Hello everyone!

TL;DR:
Journiv is a a beautiful, self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights. The mission is simple: your memories should always stay yours. Own them, don’t rent them.

Journiv 0.1.0-beta.4 is now live on GitHub and fully Docker-hostable.
Start owning your thoughts and memories forever and keep them completely private.

The Story Behind Journiv

I got into self-hosting last year and while exploring options journaling solution, I realized there wasn’t a truly modern, self-hosted equivalent to Day One or Apple Journal. Most alternatives were either general note apps or old abandoned projects.

I wanted something focused on journaling with:

  • “On This Day” memories
  • Prompt-based journaling
  • A clean, minimal, distraction-free writing experience

So… I built my own: Journiv, a beautiful (at least I am trying to make it so), self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights.

Get Involved

Give Journiv a try, share your feedback and report issues. It means a lot at this stage.

  • rockstar1215@lemmy.worldOP
    2·
    14 hours ago

    No not rude at all :) All this is a good feedback. If the lack of documentation confused you then I am sure there are many others who will get confused for the same thing. It is definitely something I should improve upon so everyone can understand the project and use it if they want to.

    Cross platform for various reasons. There are two parts to Journiv

    1. Backend: This is what you run on your local machine (ideally a small server/nas) which can run docker. You can run it on any machine.
    2. Frontend: As of now this is a web app which you can run any where. The frontend of Journiv is in flutter which is cross platform and allow native desktop and mobile apps. Mobile apps will be launched soon.

    Can I ask if you have ran/used docker before?

    • vort3@lemmy.ml
      2·
      14 hours ago

      I did run docker, specifically the portainer interface, not just the docker itself. While it’s nice and easy to use, I felt like docker obscures things behind some abstractions, for example my native services store data simply as directories and files somewhere under /srv, while docker containers keep data somewhere in docker’s directory as some storage objects with randomly generated names.

      I also completely lost control of my firewall, for example if I can just run iptables and see exactly which ports do what, I can easily read and understand line by line each firewall rule, when I use docker containers it’s all some gibberish to me, ports get opened and closed and mapped to container ports (I guess) without me ever touching iptables, and I have no idea what is happening with my server anymore.

      So yes, I tried portainer and dropped it, if you do native packages and an android app in f-droid, let me know, I really like your project so far. I can even stand the docker thingy, but we need an android app with proper sync and caching, because not everyone has internet connection 24/7. We may want to run an app, sync with backend, then add entries during a flight. Browser won’t solve this.

      • rockstar1215@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        13 hours ago

        Understood about docker. Yes, those are planned and on roadmap. Apps will be coming soon. But software takes effort and time and just to get it here I have put in hundreds of hours and there is much more to build. Currently my focus is to make the project sustainable so I can continue developing it.

        Thanks.

        • vort3@lemmy.ml
          1·
          13 hours ago

          What exactly do you mean by “sustainable”, paid/premium features? Ads? Subscription plans for users that ask you to host the server instead of self-hosting themselves?

          Yes I understand FOSS is a lot of time and effort, thank you :-)