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mtlynchtoday at 5:39 PM3 repliesview on HN

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).


Replies

verelotoday at 5:44 PM

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...

Hasztoday at 5:57 PM

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.

pavodivetoday at 5:43 PM

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!