Looking for a self hosted diary type of service. Where I can login and write small topics, ideas, tag them and date them. No need for public access.
Any recommendations?
Edit: anybody using monicahq or has experience with it?
Clarification: indeed I could use a general note taking app for this task. I already host and use silverbullet for general notes and such. I am looking at something more focused on daily events and connections. Like noting people met, sport activities and feedbacks, names, places… So tagging and date would be central, but as well as connections to calendar and contacts, and who knows what else… So I want to explore existing more advanced, more specialized apps.
Edit2: I ended up with BookStack. MonicaHQ seems very nice but proved unable to install using containers. It would not obey APP_URL properly and would mess up constantly HTTP / HTTPS redirection. Community was unrepsonsive and apparently github issues are ignore lately. So i ditched MonicaHQ and switched to BookStack: installed in a breeze (again container) and a very simple NGINX setup just worked. I will be testing it out now.
Maybe not be exactly what you’re looking for, but Logseq has a daily note-taking function. When you open it for the first time of the day, it shows you a blank journal with the current date as the header and you can put whatever you want in it. It has a search function that can search through all the notes you’ve made for specific text. It saves each day as a separate markdown file and you can sync these to your phone or other devices with Syncthing, a cloud service like Google Drive, or with git if you host something like Forgejo.
The only thing about Logseq is that it doesn’t use the standard syntax for Markdown checkboxes. Instead, it has it’s own Todo syntax, which is perfectly human readable without Logseq, but loses out of some convenience if you were to migrate to something else.
+1 for Logseq… I’m using it for work as well as personal stuff and it’s strength is automatically creating new pages (and reverse links back) by just typing ‘’ [[that new idea]] ‘’ and you’re done. Fantastic.
And sync with syncthing
If you wanna go nuts on the data, probably Obsidian.md with the built-in Daily Note plugin and the Dataview plugin, which allows you to do all kinds of crazy operations on the data in your vault as if it was a database.
If you wanna go less nuts, obsidian still has tagging, linking notes, daily notes, and all kinds of other stuff built-in and is extensible by things like the Calendar plugin from the community.
And everything is stored as plain Markdown with the occasional hint of JSON (for some plugins) so you’re not locked into using Obsidian until the end of time. Your data is yours.
(I realise this sounds like an ad but I’ve just been using Obsidian for years now and I enjoy it)
I have been using obsidian for the past few months and i really enjoy it. It’s not open source, but you can self-host a not syncing service called Obsidian LiveSync that I use to sync between my computers and phone
I’ve resorted to just syncing my fault folder using Syncthing externally, surprisingly convenient
Sweet! Does it sync to mobile? I’m on ios, and haven’t looked into syncthing
The only practical reliable solution last I checked to syncing on iOS is to go with their paid service or use iCloud and set up iCloud on the desktops you want to sync with. You can jump through hoops with GitHub sync and a paid GitHub client on iOS that makes syncing fairly easy but fundamentally iOS does not really allow background syncing for anything but iCloud. There was also a selfhosted syncing plugin I tried out before that may have gotten better but I just found it too unreliable. Worth checking out perhaps.
Syncthing does have an Android app, but I’ve never looked into doing anything syncthing-related on iOS because I simply don’t have any iOS devices :/
If it isn’t meant for others to see, what’s wrong with a .txt file you just add notes to?
Organization, sorting, categorization… Indeed a TXT can do the job, but why limiting to that…
I already use silverbullet for general notes… But looking for something more targeted and specifically meant for diary tasks.
Tried the demo, nice, but still mostly a note taking app. Seems easy to selfhost
I’d like to add to the voice about Memo. It’s very nice, stable, loads of features if you want them and actively growing.
I think of my “diary” as a stream of consciousness. Thus Memo makes sense. It feels like a personal Twitter feed.
Tagging, photo upload, links. All that works great in Memo.
I dont have the same usecase, but BookStack will check most of your boxes
Joplin
Here is a list of note-taking apps:
https://github.com/tehtbl/awesome-note-taking
By the way, I am building my own Journaling system, it’s still early stages and I am looking for ideas!
Plain text or org mode file.
I took a look at the awesome self-hosted repo and found DailyTxt. I have no experience with it but maybe worth a try?
Why not use Journal from Silverbullet since you already have it https://silverbullet.md/Library/Journal
You can just copy those templates and edit them as you wish, for example I have one for Stand-ups at work
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I went with bookstack. Simple to use and does exactly what OP is asking. Tailscale to connect so it isn’t public at all. Works great for me.
Obsidian is great for note taking and creating pathological atomic notes that connect to each other
pathological
I’m afraid this one is already taken, friend.
WordPress could probably do it, you don’t have to give it public access.
Joplin
I find Joplin cluncky and kinda slow. Also, it’s storage is not plain MD even if the files are called .md
Looks very promising, but its not self hosted? Looks more like an app / local webapp?
it’s a bunch of loose files, basically. If you wanted it actively hosted, you’d just need to put them into a web server, basically.
The “no public access” made me think a local option would suffice.
There’s noteself as a self hosted version.
I used it for a while but ended up moving to Joplin to be able to share notes with family. Noteself/Tiddly seemed like a better fit for your described use case though.
