We are rebuilding Monica

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.

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

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

> 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

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).

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

The original ShowHN:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Am I crazy or did they do this before?

Monica is apparently an open source personal CRM.

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.