5 ms·

We are rebuilding Monica

122 points by robinhood 1mo ago

brudgers 1mo ago
The original ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
- skinfaxi 1mo ago
  This is also listed in TFA, fourth paragraph.
- matternous 1mo ago
  Incredible, their website used to both simpler and have screenshots of the actual software[0], now it's just a generic LLM slop website. [0] https://archive.ph/x0sck https://archive.ph/x0sck
  - robinhood 1mo ago
    Yes, for now it is. It's a temporary website, and it'll be refreshed and de-slopified once the new version will be released.
happyrock 1mo ago
I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.
- zabriel_goss 1mo ago
  I enjoy using it! I don't tend to it as often as I could, and there are some ways in which the fields available on profiles/marking touch points don't exactly match my preferred mental model. But this is one of those instances where I appreciate opinionated software reminding me to invest in what matters in relationships.
- whythismatters 1mo ago
  I tried the self hosted app some months ago, and while the vaults concept was nice for isolating e.g work and personal, some features were a bit clunky, something wrong with tagging or connecting contacts with notes iirc. In my opinion, it also had irrelevant features, I think it was mood tracking? Based on the experience, and the fact that the announced rewrite will be more "playful," I doubt I will try it again.
tikimcfee 1mo ago
After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about." That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together. I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE". And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to. /rant
- FireBeyond 1mo ago
  But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be: > This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them. Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?
  - kstrauser 1mo ago
    > How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"? In the article's words: > Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently. > I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for the new version, and I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact. It seems obvious to me now. It wasn't obvious when we designed the first versions of Monica. Huh. Those sound like the sorts of things that sound trivial until you actually try to build them, and that they're re-engineering the model to correctly handle all the unusual edge cases.
skinfaxi 1mo ago
They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.
cheschire 1mo ago
I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.” I’ve become so cynical this year.
- YavenTeam 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- mathisfun123 1mo ago
  > I’ve become so cynical this year. sorry don't understand the relationship here...? > cynical: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives; based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
- tonymet 1mo ago
  Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- solarkraft 1mo ago
  What’s cynical about this? Everybody is modernizing their codebases for agentic development.
  - Waterluvian 1mo ago
    Well, almost everybody. Once I’m done integrating blockchain technology and minting NFTs, I’ll catch up to modernizing for agentic development.
  - artisinal 1mo ago
    I’m not. I’m optimizing my code for artisanal development.
joewils 1mo ago
I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- bitwize 1mo ago
  Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.
  - ameliaquining 1mo ago
    LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
    - hinkley 1mo ago
      They also remove the secret menu item of rewrites which is to have some peace from management because you’re not delivering anything for a long time while you do the rewrite. I predict AI will cause the number of rewrites people ask for to go down. AI is better at doing Ship of Theseus rewrites too, and those are the superior option because they leave the system available for hotfixes at all times.
      - fmajid 1mo ago
        I've heard it referred to as the Strangler Fig pattern.
  - Calavar 1mo ago
    An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.
    - 1mo ago
sikozu 1mo ago
What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler? I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?
- koralatov 1mo ago
  The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.0.0-beta, which would logically mean that this newly announced Monica 3 is actually Monica v6.x. Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.0.0-betas) never made it out of beta. It’s had five beta releases but no stable release. The stable 4.1.2 version is actually still the original Monica 1.
  - robinhood 1mo ago
    Yeah we need to change that. The other versions will be decommissioned.
andrewla 1mo ago
I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.
- NoboruWataya 1mo ago
  Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc. A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.
theplatman 1mo ago
why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/ https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/
- justinsaccount 1mo ago
  and that Chandler is different from this Chandler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
  - aitchnyu 1mo ago
    Good ol days. I bought the book about the project's failure in 2012. They mentioned Python-Wx wrapper they created and I used it for a Python project.
- koralatov 1mo ago
  The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.x, which presumably means this newly announced Monica 3 is Monica v6.x? Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.x) was a bit of a disaster for Monica. The communication around it was confusing from the start: they stopped accepting pull requests for the original version to focus entirely on the new release – which then never materialised beyond betas. That killed development of the main version for a while, until they eventually started releasing minor v4.x updates alongside the v5.x betas. On top of that, they said you might not be able to import data from Monica v1–v4 into Chandler/Monica 2 (v5) due to a database layout change. Reading that sort of killed my use of Monica as a product. I’d been a heavy user up to that point, but the thought of burying my data in a version that might be abandoned soon really put me off. I’d been a small but fairly consistent contributor before Chandler/Monica 2 was announced, but between the confusing roadmap and possible data migration barrier, I haven’t contributed since.
alibrarydweller 1mo ago
I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people. I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interacting with it more agentically, maybe having a bot update the record that I had a beer with someone instead of doing it by hand, but I like that it's focused. I have started musing about how I might bridge it to other systems, like the people I have resolved from faces in my Immich photos, but I neither want or expect Monica to do this for me.
- trashb 1mo ago
  How did you spin up the self-hosted instance? Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#". It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system. https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation
  - bananamogul 1mo ago
    Here you go: https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development That's linked from their GitHub: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica PikaPods also offers Monica hosting in your own container.
  - koralatov 1mo ago
    Not the OP, but I use a little Debian machine to self-host. It’s fairly stable when running, but updates are dicey. It has too many dependencies and every major update has had some breakage that takes a while to fix. My own instance is still on 4.0.0 despite 4.1.2 being out because I don’t see a benefit in updating and I don’t want to risk spending three or four hours hunting through yarn dependencies to undo an update that breaks things.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
kioleanu 1mo ago
Great! Maybe this time around I’ll manage to get the email notifications going
osculum 1mo ago
Weren't they already rebuilding it a couple of years ago?
jvanderbot 1mo ago
I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development. For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs. If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- Lord_Zero 1mo ago
  Can you describe what your local DB looks like and how you interact with it with Claude? This seems interesting, a skill or something with clear rules becomes the app logic and Claude the interface?
  - jvanderbot 1mo ago
    I've found skills/rules etc become cumbersome. I built a few workflows around a notes db in aws, a telegram bot to send quick notes w/o keeping claude up, zotero connectors for literature tracking, etc. Nothing really beats just "organize this folder and keep track of notes that I share". It'll invent some markdown + tags and that's good enough. Easy to overthink a list of names + maybe .jsonl entries of encounters + maybe a list of factoids. If you need phone access, /rc works fine
SoftTalker 1mo ago
It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.
- tonymet 1mo ago
  I Agree. LLMs chat assistant UI is more usable for this case. “My buddy Chris from fremont just got a promotion. Remember his new title and today’s date” is way easier than tapping a search query, filling forms, tabs and submit buttons. For me it’s Notes.app, and I appreciate the notes being available offline and syncing across devices. Full text index is great. I guess I’m lacking calendar invites, but I’ve been able to copy contents into AI to have it generate calendars for me.
- jdboyd 1mo ago
  So far that does work super well with mobile, at least not for me.
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    I assume you meant that would NOT work super-well with mobile, to which I would agree. I think there are some apps for org-mode files but I've never tried one, but there are plenty of apps for managing notes. I do as little as possible with mobile, which probably makes me an outlier. I rarely use my phone for more than texting or maps/navigation. I also don't keep dossiers on all my friends, so for me the entire premise is just academic.
tonymet 1mo ago
what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy? Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.
HaloZero 1mo ago
Will they finally integrate automated recording of interactions? It’s such a pain to record everything which is why I never used it
- what 1mo ago
  How would it even be possible? How could it automatically know you met in person and what you did? Or you had a phone call with someone (at least on iOS, access to call logs is not allowed)? Or any other interaction?
trentor 1mo ago
Am I crazy or did they do this before?
mtlynch 1mo ago
I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well: > Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently. My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model. If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings. I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling feature of Monica, but I would like a tool that does things plaintext can't like remind me to reach out to someone I haven't spoken to in a while or remind me to follow up with someone (e.g., they're interviewing for the next few weeks so check in next month to see how that's going).
- pavodive 1mo ago
  My emacs + orgmode-fu are not at that level, but I'm sure that with some thinkering one could get orgmode to trigger that sort of reminders. And it's plaintext!
- verelo 1mo ago
  This seems really simple to store as a graph database. If for some reason it does matter the model can just study the graph to contextualize its response? I don't get why Monica would struggle with this...
- Hasz 1mo ago
  likewise, I keep an md for each person, along with details about birthday, names of kids/spouse, interests, hobbies, what we last talked about etc. I really like obsidian for this, as you can model relationships (eg via tagging) if you derive value from it.
phendrenad2 1mo ago
Monica is apparently an open source personal CRM.
stillpointlab 1mo ago
> I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact I mostly skimmed this announcement, but this seems pretty obvious to me? Relationships form a graph, so it seems reasonable to use graph modeling techniques to handle them. At the least RDF triple style [1]. One thing I'd also strongly consider, in this age of LLMs, is how much you can store in text. A personal CRM seems like the kind of thing I want to check in to github, rather than deal with Postgres or even SQLite. And if you have a good structured text format (e.g. Markdown with YAML frontmatter, XML, json) then you can just point an agent at a repo and extract information that the app developer didn't even expect or add APIs for. Same for transformations. A full db engine is then more a performance optimization that can be applied for app-specific functionality. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple
- zvr 1mo ago
  RDF modeling is the way to go, especially since you can automatically get a number of relationships (like reverse) deduced automatically. Plus you get for free the fact that you can store an arbitrary number of information on each person.
jmathai 1mo ago
I have wondered this about an open source project I wrote about a decade ago [1] and still use. It's an order of magnitude less popular than Monica at 1.5k stars. The code base and logic is complex enough that it's hard to fix bugs and add features nowadays since they're few and far between. The test coverage is the only thing that makes it remotely possible. I've considered doing the same, rewriting it so that AI can reason about it better. I think it would be a net positive compared to where it is today. But it's also stable, as I mentioned, so I don't have enough motivation to do it. Just saying, I can see myself doing what this person is doing. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
kolli_kumar 1mo ago
I don’t if I will “trust” these two people/developers team for Monica anymore. They just abandon it then and there - remove features in next version like API. It’s better to have your own. I pointed Opus to fix the bugs and added API to their newer version and it was ready in few hours. The devs keep trying to do different things, like LifeOS. And this and that. Maybe they created it - but haven’t done anything worthwhile rather than spinning random things.
robtherobber 1mo ago
I initially liked using Monica, even though it was a huge pain to self host it - the installation process in particular. It felt like I was putting together a spatial ship - error after error, warning after warning. A rather frustrating experience. And after I finally managed to install it, I've used it for half a year and it felt like a lot of work to keep it updated, get used to the processes / logic behind the system etc. Furthermore, I realised that it's basically an immense liability - all my contacts and private details about myself and them in one single place. As such, my rules for a personal CRM are as follows: 1. No server to maintain; it should be an old school piece of software that I can install on my PC/phone etc. 2. I like the idea of being able to update it from different locations and using different devices; the only service acceptable here is for the makers to either offer a paid-for sync service or a method for users to sync the data between devices themselves. Not an essential service to me though. 3. No unencrypted data should be allowed, regardless of whether it stays local or it's synced across devices, or whether it's live or a backup file. 4. Backup, import, and any data handling should be easy as a breeze. Should I open my backup / db export done with version 1.0 with a fresh installation v9999 it should work flawlessly, no errors, no hiccups, no file corruption, no issues whatsoever. That data is the one reason for the software to exist and the only valuable entity in the whole scheme; if it becomes unusable, it's beyond frustrating and not a good solution to even consider. 5. No updates should be forced, ever. If my OS supports version 0.5 until year 3500, the CRM should continue work as expected. Security updates should be entirely separate than feature / bugs etc. I accept security updates within reason, in many cases I would much rather risk my PC to be hacked and data to fall in the wrong hands, than corrupt it or lose it due to some feature update I never requested or needed.
gxonatano 25d ago
There are so many of these highly specialized database-like applications that are really just particular use-cases for notetaking. A beer database app so you can remember the different beers you've had. A birthday database so you can remember all your friends' birthdays. But all you have ever needed for that is just a decent notetaking system. A pad of paper, really.

122 points by robinhood 1mo ago

brudgers 1mo ago

The original ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

skinfaxi 1mo ago
This is also listed in TFA, fourth paragraph.
matternous 1mo ago
Incredible, their website used to both simpler and have screenshots of the actual software[0], now it's just a generic LLM slop website. [0] https://archive.ph/x0sck https://archive.ph/x0sck
- robinhood 1mo ago
  Yes, for now it is. It's a temporary website, and it'll be refreshed and de-slopified once the new version will be released.

happyrock 1mo ago

I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.

zabriel_goss 1mo ago
I enjoy using it! I don't tend to it as often as I could, and there are some ways in which the fields available on profiles/marking touch points don't exactly match my preferred mental model. But this is one of those instances where I appreciate opinionated software reminding me to invest in what matters in relationships.
whythismatters 1mo ago
I tried the self hosted app some months ago, and while the vaults concept was nice for isolating e.g work and personal, some features were a bit clunky, something wrong with tagging or connecting contacts with notes iirc. In my opinion, it also had irrelevant features, I think it was mood tracking? Based on the experience, and the fact that the announced rewrite will be more "playful," I doubt I will try it again.

tikimcfee 1mo ago

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about." That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together. I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE". And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to. /rant

FireBeyond 1mo ago
But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be: > This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them. Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?
- kstrauser 1mo ago
  > How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"? In the article's words: > Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently. > I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for the new version, and I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact. It seems obvious to me now. It wasn't obvious when we designed the first versions of Monica. Huh. Those sound like the sorts of things that sound trivial until you actually try to build them, and that they're re-engineering the model to correctly handle all the unusual edge cases.

skinfaxi 1mo ago

They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.

cheschire 1mo ago

I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.” I’ve become so cynical this year.

YavenTeam 1mo ago
[flagged]
mathisfun123 1mo ago
> I’ve become so cynical this year. sorry don't understand the relationship here...? > cynical: contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives; based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
tonymet 1mo ago
Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
solarkraft 1mo ago
What’s cynical about this? Everybody is modernizing their codebases for agentic development.
- Waterluvian 1mo ago
  Well, almost everybody. Once I’m done integrating blockchain technology and minting NFTs, I’ll catch up to modernizing for agentic development.
- artisinal 1mo ago
  I’m not. I’m optimizing my code for artisanal development.

joewils 1mo ago

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

bitwize 1mo ago
Written before LLMs made Big Rewrites an absolute doddle.
- ameliaquining 1mo ago
  LLMs have meaningfully decreased the cost of rewrites, such that many rewrites that wouldn't previously have made sense now do. They are still significantly costly and often a bad idea.
  - hinkley 1mo ago
    They also remove the secret menu item of rewrites which is to have some peace from management because you’re not delivering anything for a long time while you do the rewrite. I predict AI will cause the number of rewrites people ask for to go down. AI is better at doing Ship of Theseus rewrites too, and those are the superior option because they leave the system available for hotfixes at all times.
    - fmajid 1mo ago
      I've heard it referred to as the Strangler Fig pattern.
- Calavar 1mo ago
  An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.
  - 1mo ago

sikozu 1mo ago

What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler? I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?

koralatov 1mo ago
The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.0.0-beta, which would logically mean that this newly announced Monica 3 is actually Monica v6.x. Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.0.0-betas) never made it out of beta. It’s had five beta releases but no stable release. The stable 4.1.2 version is actually still the original Monica 1.
- robinhood 1mo ago
  Yeah we need to change that. The other versions will be decommissioned.

andrewla 1mo ago

I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.

NoboruWataya 1mo ago
Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc. A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.

theplatman 1mo ago

why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/ https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/

justinsaccount 1mo ago
and that Chandler is different from this Chandler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
- aitchnyu 1mo ago
  Good ol days. I bought the book about the project's failure in 2012. They mentioned Python-Wx wrapper they created and I used it for a Python project.
koralatov 1mo ago
The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.x, which presumably means this newly announced Monica 3 is Monica v6.x? Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.x) was a bit of a disaster for Monica. The communication around it was confusing from the start: they stopped accepting pull requests for the original version to focus entirely on the new release – which then never materialised beyond betas. That killed development of the main version for a while, until they eventually started releasing minor v4.x updates alongside the v5.x betas. On top of that, they said you might not be able to import data from Monica v1–v4 into Chandler/Monica 2 (v5) due to a database layout change. Reading that sort of killed my use of Monica as a product. I’d been a heavy user up to that point, but the thought of burying my data in a version that might be abandoned soon really put me off. I’d been a small but fairly consistent contributor before Chandler/Monica 2 was announced, but between the confusing roadmap and possible data migration barrier, I haven’t contributed since.

alibrarydweller 1mo ago

I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people. I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interacting with it more agentically, maybe having a bot update the record that I had a beer with someone instead of doing it by hand, but I like that it's focused. I have started musing about how I might bridge it to other systems, like the people I have resolved from faces in my Immich photos, but I neither want or expect Monica to do this for me.

trashb 1mo ago
How did you spin up the self-hosted instance? Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#". It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system. https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation
- bananamogul 1mo ago
  Here you go: https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development https://docs.monicahq.com/developers/setup-local-development That's linked from their GitHub: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica PikaPods also offers Monica hosting in your own container.
- koralatov 1mo ago
  Not the OP, but I use a little Debian machine to self-host. It’s fairly stable when running, but updates are dicey. It has too many dependencies and every major update has had some breakage that takes a while to fix. My own instance is still on 4.0.0 despite 4.1.2 being out because I don’t see a benefit in updating and I don’t want to risk spending three or four hours hunting through yarn dependencies to undo an update that breaks things.

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kioleanu 1mo ago

Great! Maybe this time around I’ll manage to get the email notifications going

osculum 1mo ago

Weren't they already rebuilding it a couple of years ago?

jvanderbot 1mo ago

I loved Monica for a while. Paid for subscription/hosting and all that, largely to support development. For me the problem was the interface. Logging in to keep notes was a pain, I'm not that diligent. Instead I now can keep a local db with claude. It's sad, but this is precisely one example of software I can now do without due to LLMs. If this matters to the devs, then MCP is a good feature to add, encpasulating all the strangeness of CRM w/ battle tested backend or something...

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Lord_Zero 1mo ago
Can you describe what your local DB looks like and how you interact with it with Claude? This seems interesting, a skill or something with clear rules becomes the app logic and Claude the interface?
- jvanderbot 1mo ago
  I've found skills/rules etc become cumbersome. I built a few workflows around a notes db in aws, a telegram bot to send quick notes w/o keeping claude up, zotero connectors for literature tracking, etc. Nothing really beats just "organize this folder and keep track of notes that I share". It'll invent some markdown + tags and that's good enough. Easy to overthink a list of names + maybe .jsonl entries of encounters + maybe a list of factoids. If you need phone access, /rc works fine

SoftTalker 1mo ago

It's always interesting to me when I see someone build a complete personal system around functionality that to me would just be a text file, or maybe an org-mode file.

tonymet 1mo ago
I Agree. LLMs chat assistant UI is more usable for this case. “My buddy Chris from fremont just got a promotion. Remember his new title and today’s date” is way easier than tapping a search query, filling forms, tabs and submit buttons. For me it’s Notes.app, and I appreciate the notes being available offline and syncing across devices. Full text index is great. I guess I’m lacking calendar invites, but I’ve been able to copy contents into AI to have it generate calendars for me.
jdboyd 1mo ago
So far that does work super well with mobile, at least not for me.
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  I assume you meant that would NOT work super-well with mobile, to which I would agree. I think there are some apps for org-mode files but I've never tried one, but there are plenty of apps for managing notes. I do as little as possible with mobile, which probably makes me an outlier. I rarely use my phone for more than texting or maps/navigation. I also don't keep dossiers on all my friends, so for me the entire premise is just academic.

tonymet 1mo ago

what is the benefit of this over a text file / apple notes? And especially now, with LLMs , a form interface (with screens, tabs, submit buttons) is even more clumsy? Their best bet would be to train a model and provide an enhanced notepad and chat interface that extracts the relationship details directly from conversations.

HaloZero 1mo ago

Will they finally integrate automated recording of interactions? It’s such a pain to record everything which is why I never used it

what 1mo ago
How would it even be possible? How could it automatically know you met in person and what you did? Or you had a phone call with someone (at least on iOS, access to call logs is not allowed)? Or any other interaction?

trentor 1mo ago

Am I crazy or did they do this before?

mtlynch 1mo ago

I like the idea of Monica and having a way to remember things about friends and acquaintances. I tried using Monica self-hosted for about a year and felt like the authors of Monica had totally different priorities from me. This post captures it well: > Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently. My opinion: this stuff doesn't matter at all and is not useful for Monica to try to capture or model. If I meet someone at a conference or have a phone call with a long distance friend, I want to remember what we talked about. If they mention that they're planning a vacation to Thailand, the next time I talk to them, I want to say, "How was your vacation to Thailand?" I don't need software to graph all of the people in their family or to pick out "met this person at a conference" from a dropdown of 1000 options. I definitely don't need software to natively represent that two people have a half-sibling relationship as opposed to full siblings. I switched to just plain markdown files, and I never missed the relationship modeling feature of Monica, but I would like a tool that does things plaintext can't like remind me to reach out to someone I haven't spoken to in a while or remind me to follow up with someone (e.g., they're interviewing for the next few weeks so check in next month to see how that's going).

pavodive 1mo ago
My emacs + orgmode-fu are not at that level, but I'm sure that with some thinkering one could get orgmode to trigger that sort of reminders. And it's plaintext!
verelo 1mo ago
This seems really simple to store as a graph database. If for some reason it does matter the model can just study the graph to contextualize its response? I don't get why Monica would struggle with this...
Hasz 1mo ago
likewise, I keep an md for each person, along with details about birthday, names of kids/spouse, interests, hobbies, what we last talked about etc. I really like obsidian for this, as you can model relationships (eg via tagging) if you derive value from it.

phendrenad2 1mo ago

Monica is apparently an open source personal CRM.

stillpointlab 1mo ago

> I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact I mostly skimmed this announcement, but this seems pretty obvious to me? Relationships form a graph, so it seems reasonable to use graph modeling techniques to handle them. At the least RDF triple style [1]. One thing I'd also strongly consider, in this age of LLMs, is how much you can store in text. A personal CRM seems like the kind of thing I want to check in to github, rather than deal with Postgres or even SQLite. And if you have a good structured text format (e.g. Markdown with YAML frontmatter, XML, json) then you can just point an agent at a repo and extract information that the app developer didn't even expect or add APIs for. Same for transformations. A full db engine is then more a performance optimization that can be applied for app-specific functionality. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple

zvr 1mo ago
RDF modeling is the way to go, especially since you can automatically get a number of relationships (like reverse) deduced automatically. Plus you get for free the fact that you can store an arbitrary number of information on each person.

jmathai 1mo ago

I have wondered this about an open source project I wrote about a decade ago [1] and still use. It's an order of magnitude less popular than Monica at 1.5k stars. The code base and logic is complex enough that it's hard to fix bugs and add features nowadays since they're few and far between. The test coverage is the only thing that makes it remotely possible. I've considered doing the same, rewriting it so that AI can reason about it better. I think it would be a net positive compared to where it is today. But it's also stable, as I mentioned, so I don't have enough motivation to do it. Just saying, I can see myself doing what this person is doing. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

kolli_kumar 1mo ago

I don’t if I will “trust” these two people/developers team for Monica anymore. They just abandon it then and there - remove features in next version like API. It’s better to have your own. I pointed Opus to fix the bugs and added API to their newer version and it was ready in few hours. The devs keep trying to do different things, like LifeOS. And this and that. Maybe they created it - but haven’t done anything worthwhile rather than spinning random things.

robtherobber 1mo ago

I initially liked using Monica, even though it was a huge pain to self host it - the installation process in particular. It felt like I was putting together a spatial ship - error after error, warning after warning. A rather frustrating experience. And after I finally managed to install it, I've used it for half a year and it felt like a lot of work to keep it updated, get used to the processes / logic behind the system etc. Furthermore, I realised that it's basically an immense liability - all my contacts and private details about myself and them in one single place. As such, my rules for a personal CRM are as follows: 1. No server to maintain; it should be an old school piece of software that I can install on my PC/phone etc. 2. I like the idea of being able to update it from different locations and using different devices; the only service acceptable here is for the makers to either offer a paid-for sync service or a method for users to sync the data between devices themselves. Not an essential service to me though. 3. No unencrypted data should be allowed, regardless of whether it stays local or it's synced across devices, or whether it's live or a backup file. 4. Backup, import, and any data handling should be easy as a breeze. Should I open my backup / db export done with version 1.0 with a fresh installation v9999 it should work flawlessly, no errors, no hiccups, no file corruption, no issues whatsoever. That data is the one reason for the software to exist and the only valuable entity in the whole scheme; if it becomes unusable, it's beyond frustrating and not a good solution to even consider. 5. No updates should be forced, ever. If my OS supports version 0.5 until year 3500, the CRM should continue work as expected. Security updates should be entirely separate than feature / bugs etc. I accept security updates within reason, in many cases I would much rather risk my PC to be hacked and data to fall in the wrong hands, than corrupt it or lose it due to some feature update I never requested or needed.

gxonatano 25d ago

There are so many of these highly specialized database-like applications that are really just particular use-cases for notetaking. A beer database app so you can remember the different beers you've had. A birthday database so you can remember all your friends' birthdays. But all you have ever needed for that is just a decent notetaking system. A pad of paper, really.