31. Journal/Diary Applications

This chapter looks at different open source journal/diary applications. As usual we look both at E2EE and non E2EE versions. These applications are meant to provide you with an oversight of your thoughts, the things you did during the day, how you felt, etcetera. Also there will be apps that are local only i.e just work on your phone for instance or once that work via your server that can be accessed on multiple devices and used by multiple users. In this case it is especially necessary that your data is E2EE, since you don't want someone else reading your most personal notes. However, if you host your own server at home then you can go with some beautiful journal applications that are not E2EE.

At this moment the only E2EE encrypted open source diary apps would be Notesnook and Joplin ;) However, I would say they are more focused on being a note taking app with folders, sub folders for studying and developing. So far the best project in my opinion is Journiv that would be most focused on your personal life/diary format, but unfortunately it is not E2EE at this moment. However, if you are self hosting this obviously does not matter ;)


1. Memos

The first application that we will discuss is the Memos application

 

2. Journiv

Community: Discord

At this moment I use Journiv as my main diary application for my personal life. The reason I use this one is the following

  1. It allows me to create multiple Journals for different things. For instance a journal for Sports, Work, Relationships, Health, etcetera.
  2. Second it allows me to create tags. With these tags I can easily navigate how often I did or had something. For instance how often you went to the gym, had an anxiety attack, how often you took vitamine pills etcetera. 
  3. It is a new kid on the block with lots of features planned
  4. It integrates with Immich, but will integrate with many other features according to their roadmap
  5. The only down side to it is that you won't get all the features unless you get a paid subscription. The price is not that high, but it always makes you wonder to what extend the open source app will become a commercial product and just uses open source to sell. However, this could also change over the years of course. At this moment the free version gives you enough capabilities. 
  6. It allows you to add people to your memories as well. Hence, you can also easily click on a person in your diary and see all the notes that included these people.

3. Daily You