Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working.
Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of software made all the difference re keeping up with people. The e-mail notifications is a killer feature - so simple, yet I've never done it before in my personal inbox.
I think the fact that it's an external service and not inside your inbox matters from a UX perspective. I have this other place where I define the logic, and then receive it in the screen I look at every morning.
Originally came to know of the project years back through https://sive.rs/hundreds, and while he's a bit better (a lot better) at it than I am, I can confidently say I've stayed in touch with dozens of people thanks to Monica. His notion of "ranked lists" also makes sense, at least to me, as a mental framework for managing personal contacts.
Shameless plug (for the creators!): I 100% recommend Monica, have contributed to it, and am a big big supporter of https://github.com/djaiss (Regis), https://github.com/asbiin (Alexis), et al.
They're actively working on something new now, so if that helps them somehow - link incoming:
A personal comment: There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.
Example: Say I met someone years ago at school, and I thought she was pretty cool. I added her to Monica and I reach out to her once in a while to see what's up. We talk about work, exchange some personal stories, and go our separate ways. I might not think about her for months at a time, but then - quite intentionally - I think about her when the email notification comes up. It makes me happy that this person is somehow in my life.
Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.
If it works, right?
I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills.
It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.
One year he resolved to "do better about keeping up" - apparently feeling bad that our entire message history was him texting me a month before the convention asking if he could stay with me, and me saying that he could. True to his word, ever after that, he has periodically texted me every few months just to make idle conversation. He even stopped going to the convention but still keeps messaging me periodically - which I appreciate because it shows he didn't view me only as a hotel replacement.
Still, I prefer our old arrangement. Frankly, I don't need to know how he is doing every few months and I find it a bit awkward to make small talk any way. As I just have one friend that does this it's not so bad, but if I had more friends who wanted to just regularly "check in" like this, I'd have to start blocking people, ending friendships, or developing an automated routine to tell the curious that I'm doing well and to ask about their family and our mutual friends, etc.
Exactly. I have this thing that I'm not good at. I have this tool I use to be better at it. Everybody wins.
One might say that computers in general are tools for computational work, since people are not as good at crunching numbers in their head at a consistent, repetitive and deterministic fashion over time.
One might even be right. :)
I would rather make a calendar invite / use <insert your fav software> and remember to call <valued loved one or friend> and feel bad about having to do that...
Then forget to call and feel worse about forgetting.
Improving social skills and using them manipulatively are entirely different things. If you've ever known or worked with psychopaths you'll get that immediately. I suppose there's a continuum but still.
I am not really into self-hosting and homelabs, in the sense that I never got too deep into the proper architecture of it all and the "right" way of doing things. I find that when I'm creating tooling (or setting up tooling, for that matter) for myself, the only thing that matters is speed of setup and ease of use. Hosted is fine for many things if it's decoupled in a sensible way from your public identity or does not actually reveal anything that interesting about you, IMHO, but I assume that would be an unpopular opinion.
A corollary from this "proposition" is that I leave the world of software often. For things that I have yet to find proper software for, but are indeed great needs that I have in my day to day life, I find my ways.
Going back to your question, I'll admit the other two tools are a bit underwhelming.
I'm a religious nail biter, and the only thing that ever made me stop was jotting in a pad every time I want to bite. I usually keep a small pad (as in a mini-notebook) in my backpack and draw hashtags and lines in it when I'm seeing the habit return. I'm now going through something a bit difficult personally, and while I'm constantly biting right now I know that when it will really bother me I can pull up the pad and stop biting again. It's stupid, I know, but again - it works for me. I got the idea from a book, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit).
The other one is the Hacker's Diet Online (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html) - it's a weight watching tool by the guy who built AutoCad. I lost ±24 pounds after reading his book (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and have been tracking my weight ever since (±2 years).
One recurring thing in my stack, as you noticed, is tracking. I am an AVID tracker of many things, and generally speaking advise anyone who is in a loop over something to do the same.
It simply... works.
If anyone wants to talk personal tracking, it's not hard to find me on the internets (TomGranot in most places except here). I have a plethora of ideas & opinions on the subject.
I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all. Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.
I actually think it's more genuine to care enough to write down to call somebody instead of letting it slip by you. Being determined to build the tooling to be good at something doesn't have to stay within the professional realm - it should extend to personal life as well.
I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations.
I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444
I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable.
Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school.
The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC.
If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.
I had completely forgotten about this, in fact I had been using the notes field on the contacts app, but thanks to this post I’m going back to it again.
What are the other top two of your personal stack?
Re your question, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008.
In the past I've been using many tools for managing all kinds of data. In the 90s MS Access for creating personal database "apps". In the 2000s various CRM solutions (desktop-based, self-hosted and hosted; among others Act CRM, SugarCRM, Highrise). Also, extensively used a self-hosted version of Confluence as a personal wiki (yeah, way to heavy for the goal). And then also many many PIM tools for managing personal notes, contact data and notes.
I have seen many tools come and go. Many of them have high maintenance costs in the long run, especially if you decide to use a self-hosted version. But even if you decide to pay for the hosted version: Your data is stuck in someone elses solution.
Finally, I come to realize, that no matter how shiny and beautiful an interface might seem, in the end the long-term accessibility and the ability to keep and own my data is much more important than anything else.
Now I keep most of my essential data in plain text-files, albeit in a structured way (in org-mode + Emacs). Emacs + Lisp are just wonderful: I can write some code in Emacs Lisp to create the perfect workflow, for all kinds of use-cases (meeting notes, contact data, overviews in ascii-tables, text-files dedicated for certain contacts, structured in org-mode and many more).
I tend to think that Emacs + Org + plain-text will be here in fifty years from now, when all other shiny solutions are replaced by the latest trends du-jour. Feels good to liberate my data.
Dependencies break, packages are abandoned, or the whole project gets abandoned, then try to maintain the regular updates, patches, fixes. Whole lot of work, until you give up, have yet another database dump in your hand and no interface to work with the data. Of course you can query those tables, get your data out of them, but that's another story.
I contributed to Monica a bit and the “desktop version” was always a huge GitHub issue. That, along with an impossible “E2E” encryption issue, devoid of any understanding of RDMBS or TLS, is why I didn’t go much further with my contributions.
Edit: see issues 531, and 543.
Just please make sure you're using a volume so the data is persistent. And also please keep backups in case that volume explodes.
This is a particularly bizarre rebuttal. Usually the answer to this kind of thing would be "well yes but we can only solve 1 problem at a time", but in this case it's not even that. There already are ways to contact people privately!
The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users.
I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to user’s data - it stays completely within the Apple ecosystem.
I have also taken a mobile-first approach, I think that focus reduced some of the installation and maintenance barriers for users. With the iOS app there’s no deployment or setup cost for users. Personal interactions (chat) and data (contacts, calendars) are already managed through our phones, so the iOS app also seems to be a natural fit for other reasons.
I hope to see more products/projects where the users data, monetization, and developer incentives align. It’s great to see an open source PRM project that matches those incentives.
Thanks!
Are you using iOS 14? After the upgrade I’ve seen an increase in crashes for CloudKit storage. Hope to have a fix out soon.
I will follow up on the data mobility in your other comment.
It seems like a tough business model, to try to sell a one-off utility like this. Over a 50 year lifetime, that's $4,500.
It feels like in the eighties, I'd pay $20 (which is $40 in today's dollars) for a shareware tool, and it'd do this for the rest of my life (or until my 80286 running DOS became obsolete, whichever came first).
(Minus costs, which are low for a web service)
There's a point that maximizes profit, and my point was that $4,500 might be a bit beyond that for a personal CRM.
The best part of it would be that unlike in a CRM I wouldn't have to keep this data up-to-date. My (actual) friends would update their own data, only. Everybody would need to only keep their own data which they want their actual friends to see up-to-date.
"Um, /u/galaxyLogic? Why aren't I in you "ACTUAL" friends list? Is there something you want to tell me? Are we not actually friends?"
I see what you're trying to say - Facebook friends are often just random chumps you've met once, never or are distantly related to someone else you've met once - but I think a tiered system could quickly become something of burden on said friends :P
I can see the point. Nobody wants to be perceived as rude. At the same time I think everybody understands that if we've never met in person we probably are not friends enough to exchange phone-numbers for instance.
This is an organized list and comparison of Personal CRMs.
The reason I ask this question is to figure out if it’s worth trying or not. On another forum, I’d asked about self hosting Ghost (the publishing platform) and someone said that it’s a pain to keep up with it and that the makers of the software have made it in a way that the hosted solution would be preferred by potential users.
However, I've since stopped using it because the upgrades did fuck it up more than once I think and it was too slow to add information, too much friction.
I've since started using markdown files edited in Sublime and synced over Dropbox. Quick, no maintenance overhead.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867741
I've always wanted to create something like this myself. Glad to see someone do it.
It was extremely simple on purpose, you had two views:
- List of people: sorted based on when you needed to get in touch with them
- The profile: add notes (with a contact more/less often when submitting) and choose social circles (by closeness: Family, Close Friend, Work, Acquaintance... or by situation: Golf Club, Gym, Chess...)
Based on the circles, notes, ratings, etc. the App organized them from top to bottom on a "Who should you contact now". It was cool.
As I grew older I used it less and less and ended up retiring it. It helped me become a better person by internalizing the importance of remembering names, hobbies, FORD method (Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams) and improving my small talk or breaking the ice.
If you've never used a personal CRM and you struggle to maintain and nourish relationships I highly recommend you to try something, either Monica or what someone suggested of having text files, a spreadsheet, notes...
I made my own solution to this 6 years ago and use it to this day. my solution leverages google people api so it’s automatically synced as part of the notes field of my contacts, and I have an app in my iphone and on my desktop and a cloud interface to quickly manage and query the data.
10/10 recommend and wish it was more normalized
https://github.com/monicahq/monica/blob/master/docs/user/car...
It's like - I don't want a TODO app when I can create simple Note with checkboxes.
(Moreover, Contacts is absolutely relational, in any sense that matters. There's a Relations field. It's stored in a sqlite db.)
Brain + contact info on your computer/phone + calendar with reminders for birthdays etc. + pencil and paper for notes catches the most important things but allows us to forget the less important things.
I tend to think back of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and there's an entire chapter devoted to what is basically an analog CRM and devoting time to staying up to date with it (including scheduling calls).
If anything I think a CRM applies even more because I care more about friends and family than I do about a sales pipeline. More effort = more importance, in my book.
Also there's the added bonus of not having to remember these things so I can focus on remembering more useful things.
1. Intent design: CRM seems designed principally as a sales tool and I don't want to sell or be sold to.
2. Information retention: I think regular calendar/contacts/reminders built into your phone balances the "don't forget important stuff" with "don't make an effort to keep track of things that aren't important."
3. Paid service/subscription: I'm OK with contacts apps but I kind of have contacts, notes, and a calendar built into my phone already and have no desire to pay a subscription fee.
Elaborating on (1) a bit: I don't really set out to "influence" my friends and I'd be kind of unhappy if they were trying to "influence" me.
Influencing family might make more sense though, like influencing kids to study or family members to exercise and eat a healthy diet.
The danger in family and friend relationships is turning things into a contract which can be unforgiving and intrusive. "Well, household database shows that you've been late taking the garbage out 52% of the time for the past 3 years!"
As a child I dreamed of having a smartwatch that would record everything my family members said so I could play it back to them and prove infallibly that I was right. I was glad they didn't have such a thing to apply to me though.
I imagine in the future we'll be wearing smart glasses or contact lenses that will identify the name of any person within view who we've met before, as well as their relevant statistics and information including data from online services like social media or dating sites (much the way that CRM provide sales clerks with information on every customer who walks into the store.) I'm not sure that's entirely a good idea.
For privacy, the app stores information locally on-device only. Sync of contacts via phone, Google mail or calendar is possible. Contact information is streamed to the device rather than stored on a server.
> This project is for people who have hard time remembering details about other people's lives - especially the ones they care about.
My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship database?
I've tried something similar to this during my college days. I painstakingly inputted all my phone contacts to google contacts. I searched their facebook for their birthdates, what university they were attending and what degree they were studying.
Looking back at it now, that was a tremendous waste of time. I've met maybe 1000 people in my lifetime, I could count in my ten fingers the people I care about. Can people actually care about other people, AT SCALE, to the point where you would need an app for that? I've read in other comments, one case in particular, where an uncle kept a spreadsheet of facts about the people he cared about, and that many people went to his funeral. So fine maybe people do need something like this to scale personal relationships.
My other argument is that this FEELS ungenuine, and I'm not sure how else to explain it. Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday; I feel like there is a huge gap between the two. I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.
What do you think?
I think of it like this. I don't pay attention to lyrics in most music, I pay attention to the feel/tune. With friends, it's all about emotional connection, not my ability to recall facts. I honestly don't think one or the other is better or worse, it's just different. People show care differently.
For me, who has trouble with things that people often associate with caring (like yourself maybe), this acts as a crutch to help me show caring in a way that other people recognize but that isn't natural to me. I would actually argue that me investing into a program like this actually shows just how much I care that I want to make up for my natural capability with a pretty involved program.
Another side benefit, it's also really nice for acquaintances that you really want to keep up with, but because of irregular correspondence they are very easy to slip from memory.
If you can't remember these basic details, it's a sign that person is not close enough to you for it to actually matter.
Or, maybe you're like me and you just met the person five minutes ago. Either case is forgivable.
You might be both overthinking it, and overestimating some of the people who would use this.
I put friends birthdays in my Google calendar. It's not because I don't care about them enough to remember it. It's because I care enough to work around my own failings for them.
I think she’d be more shocked that I was able to remember it than she would mind at all if I kept notes about her so I could remember. I think she would take immense personal offense if I did so using something terrible like Facebook, as would most in my family — but if I’m keeping it local to myself alone, I don’t expect it would be any trouble at all. She trusts that by now I’m competent at the Internet, because she watched me learn how to do my computer jobs as a young child.
I would be the topic of the day at a family gathering for doing this, though! We would all hash out the entire thing in lurid detail over meals and walks. Some would ask to see their records, and I’d happily comply. If I didn’t feel strongly about them, I wouldn’t bother taking notes at all, and they all understand the family rule: only ask questions you truly wish to know the answer to. If they can’t handle what I relegate to a notebook about them, then they shouldn’t ask to read my notebook about them. This is obvious to us. It’s a simple extension of the family rule.
Maybe your social circles are different and less flexible on this matter, but that’s not at all how it would work for mine.
You mean like the effort of writing it down? I see nothing ingenuine about understanding your cognitive limits and working around them to show that you care.
> I've met maybe 1000 people in my lifetime, I could count in my ten fingers the people I care about. Can people actually care about other people, AT SCALE, to the point where you would need an app for that?
Well I'd like to work on caring about more people. I think with personal CRMS it might help expand out my pool of and push conversations past the same ole small talk each time. Like if I can pull up something from the last convo that'd help.
> Like if I can pull up something from the last convo that'd help.
I can relate to this. Every time I'm alone with someone, my brain goes to overdrive and I ask myself questions like "what can we talk about" , "what common interests do we have", "how can I make him/her laugh", "what about this person that I don't know yet that I can ask" just to 'develop' the relationship.
But after a while of doing this, and observing myself doing this, I get burnt out and go 'f it, who cares'. If I cared about this person, it wouldn't feel such a grind to create/maintain this relationship.
It’s a weird equation of care and ability while at the same time taking someone seeking out a tool to better achieve X as evidence of not caring about X. One of those connections seems arbitrary to me, the other backwards.
In the same way, perhaps it's the case that if you remember more about more people then you will care more about more people? Certainly, making the effort to remember would suggest you care to begin with and wish for that to grow.
One way of showing you care is making the effort to remember important things. Another is staying in contact. I’ve used Anki to remember friends kids names, and Monica to remind me to stay in touch. Very occasionally, I use Monica to remember where a friend is in their life last we spoke. Often a tiny cue is enough to jog your memory.
You might consider that “unauthentic”, but I would say people’s brains and memories are just really different —- what’s easy for you is not necessarily easy for everyone else. Using these tools let’s me be closer to the type of friend, brother, son that I’d like to be.
I should add, having moved overseas, Monica has also helped me maintain relationships with people who are very important to me, but who I may only get the chance to speak to every few weeks, or less. I’m quite grateful for it.
I mean aren't you going to have to write it down somewhere anyway? Maybe you're not familiar with the world of journaling/notebooks, but people use them (and have been using them) for the same purpose. Before technology, people still wrote information down about the people they cared about.
> Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday
I mean if you're taking the time to write it down I think that demonstrates a level of genuineness. It's not always possible to e.g. have the foresight 3 months in advance to say "ah I can't do that because my friend's child's birthday is then".
>I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.
I think authenticity has a lot more to do with experiences you have with a person, which is augmented by making sure you're available to spend time with them on important dates, having awareness of their likes and dislikes, and just taking note of general information. I find that, personally, when I take the time to write these things down, I actually keep them in my memory.
It wasn't that I didn't care about them, I truly did, but I frequently mix up names of even my closest friends if I'm not paying attention and make great effort to not give others the impression I don't care enough to remember.
Let’s turn this around: if a friend wishes you a happy birthday, do you know or care how and why they remembered?
On the other side, however, I've already sent countless happy birthdays, merry christmases, and happy new years. Every time I do it I have this gut feeling of inauthenticity. I think to myself, "do I really care about these people".
I'm just basically trying to figure out if this is my personal issue or if anyone else feel the same way. Thanks for the response!
I would say you're looking at it completely wrong and you don't have to forget somebodies birthday that many times before you write it down because all it does is hurt everybody. Some segment of the population forgets these things EVEN WITH the inner circle of people they know.
You and others probably have a much better memory than I.
I don't use tools though, we have a physical birthday calendar that helps.
A Personal Relationship Manager feels like something that would be used against you in a jury trial. Not any specific information entered into it, just the fact alone that you were using it.
However, I was never able to successfully upgrade it (circa 2018) and therefore moved on to another option because I needed features unavailable and the effort of migrating my data to a new instance was more than the effort of going elsewhere.
Might be time for me to revisit as it looks to have come a long way.
I was ready to pay for it to actually be my source of truth for my contacts database, and store a lot more metadata that I'm currently trying to hack into custom Google Contacts fields (profiles on other sites/services primarily).
True wishlist: A PRM like Monica, which can sync two-ways with Google Contacts / carddav, and which is able to fetch & search through communication history with all linked services for the contact (not just emails but also SMS, DMs in various services, public posts on fb/twitter etc). This could naturally evolve into a multi-messaging tool like the old libpurple based ones (Pidgin etc).
Also, please, if you do a contact manager, let me store humans and businesses as separate contact types. My relationship with "Ada L." is very different to my relationship with "Amazon Business Customer Support Phone Number".
> We are like you, and this is why we are on GitHub: we hate big corporations that do not have at heart the best interest at heart for their users, even if they say otherwise.
That's definitely what I think of when I think Microsoft!
I've started just using Google Contacts for this. It syncs and integrates with all my devices, supports birthday reminders, relations and custom fields, and has a general purpose note taking area for gifts and other details.
I only wish the custom fields were more powerful/versatile and that the relations could be hyperlinked with other contacts instead of being just text fields.
Amicu is basically SwiftUI on top of a local SQLite db. It supports tracking the last contact date, catchup reminders, birthday reminders, Siri, Shortcuts (for semi automatic workflows), and widgets. Save the main comm app per contact (WhatsApp, Telegram, FB, etc.) for batch messages like a birthday event invite.
Feedback is welcome.
I'm not sure what "mark people as in touch" is, and to me it sounds the same as adding someone from your contact, but it looks like this is a different operation from adding a contact to the list.
I like the "more" tab and its contents.
Out of curiosity, as I'm interest and work in UX, did you test this app with some real people / how did you test its UX?
Marking someone in touch means you interacted with this person somehow for example you met or called. This sets the last contact date to today. This is used for reminders to catchup after some time and sorting the contact list to see which contacts you met recently and where it's been some time.
Setting in touch and adding contacts uses a similar UI, which can be confusing in the beginning. I need to improve this. Thanks!
You can also contact me at kai@amicu.app, if you've more questions or feedback.
I ever used some open source PHP soft (forums and wikis) several years ago. The development of these soft has been discontinued for a long time now.
Recently, I decided to re-install the php4 age but failed. There are too many APIs and syntax are broken now.
Anyone else have the same experiences?
If you are on PHP4 and are moving to the 7.x series plan for some pain.
My problem is I try to find things that will work with flat files. I just spent some time moving from Mediawiki to PMwiki, because of the database nonsense in keeping that in sync with PHP and Mediawiki.
I'd love to find a CRM tool that had the flexibility shown here but would live in flat files that I may have a chance to import into something else.
Or what if we don't remember due to valuing things more than people? The app becomes an illusory replacement of genuine interaction.
I think this is a good augmentation of our own mind, as are the others
For everything you do, you should consider "what if this is used by the worst person to target the most vulnerable people?" Stalker exes, online scammers, insurance companies, 4chan wieners, toxic MRAs, data brokers working for PIs etc. Assume an open S3 bucket with data from 5000 users. Imagine how much identify theft and intimate partner violence that could enable.
The usual trade-off is ease of access -- on the cloud you can get it anywhere. But it isn't encrypted, it's accessed via an API, and you're dependent on someone not fucking that up.
This software can run offline, which is good, but the monetisation is via the cloud, which is bad.
Too bad portable software is such a shitshow. Everyone has these enormous runtime engines and there is no way to be confident in anything they run hasn't been updated the siphon off everything to a random cloud instance. It's architected to trust the cloud rather than devices we can physically control.
I think it has a lot of potential.
Personal $0/year - Manage limited relationships - Add unlimited contacts - Contacts sync daily - Unlimited integrations - Up to 5 introductions only
Its mobile app seems to be discontinued, but I don't care if I can use it via web.
They even have an example: https://airtable.com/templates/marketing-and-sales/exp7KcHbb...
> In the case of personal or household activities, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK outlines the exemption as being the processing of personal data in the course of a ‘purely’ personal or household activity, with “no connection to a professional or commercial activity”
(source: https://www.hutsix.io/does-gdpr-apply-to-individuals/)
