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We are rebuilding Monica

monicahq.com

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Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#41

Post by Taikonerd »

tonymet wrote: post #37
tikimcfee wrote: post #4

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 h…

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#42

Post by pavodive »

mtlynch wrote: post #40

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 bro…

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!

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#43

Post by verelo »

mtlynch wrote: post #40

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 bro…

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...

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#44

Post by mgkimsal »

joewils wrote: post #8

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

IIRC the monica team already did this between v1 and v2, so v2 to v3 as another rewrite would be the same move.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#45

Post by Hasz »

mtlynch wrote: post #40

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 bro…

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.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#46

Post by wpietri »

tonymet wrote: post #37
tikimcfee wrote: post #4

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 h…

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

Your theory is that Facebook not only had no impact on that but could have done nothing to improve things?

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#48

Post by whythismatters »

happyrock wrote: post #3

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.

I tried the self hosted app some months ago, and while the vaults concept was nice for isolating e.g work and personal, some features were a bit clunky, something wrong with tagging or connecting contacts with notes iirc. In my opinion, it also had irrelevant features, I think it was mood tracking? Based on the experience, and the fact that the announced rewrite will be more "playful," I doubt I will try it again.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#49

Post by [deleted] »

tonymet wrote: post #27
cheschire wrote: post #7

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.

Cynicism is an attitude, and a choice. And comments like these are so cliche. AI is an amazing tool, and you have a volunteer helping to create the next best edition of a charity project.

[deleted]

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#50

Post by tonymet »

Taikonerd wrote: post #41
tonymet wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause and effect is reversed here. The trends leading to collapse of the family , neighborhoods and friendships predate facebook by at least 40 years. Bowling Alone describes the collapse covering the 80s & 90s, and the trends were 20-30 years mature by then.

IIUC, Bowling Alone pointed the finger at TV. If you looked at time-use surveys in the 50s, versus when Putnam was writing in the late 90s, it looked like TV watching had eaten much of the time that used to be spent doing IRL social activities.

TV was one factor, along with migration/ commuting, two-income households (and now divided households), and more generally that boomers were more individualistic, though he didn't explain why really.

Those , and other factors are more influential than facebook. If anything, facebook helped remote friendships stay connected ( better than phone, letters).

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