Hello everyone!
TL;DR:
Journiv is a a beautiful, self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights. The mission is simple: your memories should always stay yours. Own them, don’t rent them.
Journiv 0.1.0-beta.4 is now live on GitHub and fully Docker-hostable.
Start owning your thoughts and memories forever and keep them completely private.
The Story Behind Journiv
I got into self-hosting last year and while exploring options journaling solution, I realized there wasn’t a truly modern, self-hosted equivalent to Day One or Apple Journal. Most alternatives were either general note apps or old abandoned projects.
I wanted something focused on journaling with:
- “On This Day” memories
- Prompt-based journaling
- A clean, minimal, distraction-free writing experience
So… I built my own: Journiv, a beautiful (at least I am trying to make it so), self-hosted, privacy-first journaling app with mood tracking, daily prompts, and meaningful insights.
Get Involved
Give Journiv a try, share your feedback and report issues. It means a lot at this stage.
It looks like this is open-source, but not Free Software, since you’re using PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 as your license. Did you consider other licenses like any of the GPL licenses or BSD-2/3 Clause license, Apache-2.0 or any of the others that fit the Free Software classification?
Journiv is source-available but not “Free Software” under the FSF/OSI definition. I chose the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license intentionally to keep the code open for personal and educational use which allow hosting for non-commercial while preventing “commercial” redistribution or hosting for commercial gain without permission.
My motivation behind Journiv is to give a solution to self hosted people like me and other a journal first experience on par with any major cloud offering so that they don’t have to mold their usage to a notes app and be unsatisfied and frustrated like me. This license enables everyone in the self hosted community to use Journiv.
I did consider permissive and copyleft licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, etc.), but sustainability is a major concern for this project. I have already spent hundreds of hours on this over last couple of months and there is so much more to build (take a look at the issues page of github repo). I want to keep development open and transparent while ensuring that commercial entities can’t simply repackage and profit from it.
I see where you’re coming from, and can understand why you decided to prevent commercial repackaging and tivoization. Source-available sounds like it’s proprietary, which I assume it’s not.
Thanks! My main focus right now is simply building the product, the license doesn’t matter much if the product itself isn’t good yet. It’s always easier to move to a less restrictive license later than to go the other way, so this is the approach I’m starting with.