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Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

monicahq.com

451–460 of 586 posts

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separation of responsibilities? Statuses were great as a brief update of a friend's change in their state of mind. I could follow up as I saw fit, often just keeping it in mind for the next time we met up. Posts and news is just a steady steam of information... repeated opinions, content that forms their opinion, attempts at converting others, or minor events that would have been interesting to talk about but bland n…

I think this gets close to the meat of it, yes. TheFacebook in 2004 was still something closer to its yearbook metaphor: here's the people I met this year in college and here's what they wrote on my yearbook that year. I guess the real emblematic touch point of the change over the years is much more from each person's "Wall" being the important push hubs of conversations to the "Wall" being subsumed by the modern "Ti…

I think the new equivalent of "I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall" is "I'm going to send this to my friend on Messenger", although that can be borderline too once you start talking about groups with more than two people.

I agree Events is the highlight of Facebook these days. Although, it has been steadily corroded as well, and FB Messenger's Plans has muddied the waters a fair chunk.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#452
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Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#453

Quick note to the founders: You need to add more genders. A lot of early adopters in the Bay Area have friends who are non-binary or are non-binary themselves. I don't want to be forced to mis-gender people who don't identify as male or female.

Definitely. My bad. The kind of stuff you don't think about when you are your only user. I'll add that, as well as the possibility to not indicate gender at all.

Instead of "gender", you should make it "preferred pronoun".

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This product is dangerous to privacy. It's easy to imagine how this data could be exploited if Monica is sold to Facebook, Google, etc. How are you working to guarantee my data is protected from any manner use outside my own?

As these things go, the privacy policy is excellent, and can be read in under a minute: https://monicahq.com/privacy.html

My question is about this line:

> When you close your account, we will immediately destroy all your personal information and won't keep any backup.

I'd love to hear how you're purging users from your backups, and how long you keep backups.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#455

My uncle died suddenly this year. He was unbelievably caring - and not just to family - but to everyone he ever met. His funeral was jam packed with everyone from homeless people to executives of multi-billion dollar companies. I always thought that his ability to always have you, and whatever you had last talked about with him, on his mind at any moment was some kind of supernatural gift. I was surprised to find out…

I feel like him doing that with a spreadsheet is more impressive than having some kind of photographic social memory. He cared about people enough to make familiarity and kindness a discipline and habit that he lived. Despite many of our apps, life hacks, and "social medias" we miss the simple insight; social kindness is rooted in just giving enough of a damn to have a discipline for it. Any tool is secondary.

"social kindness is rooted in just giving enough of a damn to have a discipline for it" -binarypaean

Well said! Thanks for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sign up with facebook is not working for me. Perhaps because I have two factor on. Also, consider adding an import feature from gmail, vCard, etc Finally, why include male/female binary as the only required field besides name. Seems a little odd

Damn it, I broke it. I'll fix it today, or remove it entirely, I still don't know about it. I like the idea of being able to quickly log in, but it's yet another feature to maintain, so...

Counterpoint since I only see anti-FB replies below: I absolutely love seeing OAuth login. I don't have to create yet another password, or worry about whether your site has reasonable password security. Even when I choose to create a login instead, just seeing it gives me some confidence that you're competent enough to set it up, and probably gave some thought to the security trade-offs surrounding login in general.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#457

Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. The site is not perfect, it's not mobile optimized, there are probably bugs, there is a gazillion features missing, no APIs but it's a labour of love, open-source and I hope it will help people other than me. I want to grow this product but I need to know what you need, people. Edit: sorry for the bugs I see on my server popping here and there. Didnt expect t…

I've been learning Laravel for some time now and use it for a few personal and work projects, I'm also new to the open source world and yet to contribute much - are you looking for contributors, or are you just on GitHub for the transparency?

Both :-D I'm not looking for help necessarily but if it helps create a better product, I'm more than happy about it. I don't think we can create a great thing all alone. The idea to open source it, amongst other thing, is the transparency.

Re: Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family

#459
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question! Actually, the last time I saw my uncle, I asked how he could be generous, and yet not be taken advantage of or stuck with horrible people. He said that what he'd learned to do was to condition whatever help he was offering on the person taking some tiny step first. Often, it was as simple as "make up a budget for you and your wife to go on a three day getaway, send it to me, and I'll write yo…

Your short retelling of your uncle's kindness has rather inspired me to be more diligent in my approach to being kind to others. Thank you for sharing!

It really is a thoughtful and beautiful gift to his uncle beyond the grave which is truly amazing.
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