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).
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.
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!
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...