Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We are rebuilding Monica

monicahq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 101 posts

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#61

Post by Goofy_Coyote »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #57
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…

I am not the target audience for this product, but I can’t get over the irony of building a CRM specifically to track details about people you genuinely care about

I use Obsidian as my personal CRM, and I get this a lot.

It feels like people put more value on memorizing facts than writing them down, as if it’s somehow more noble to remember something about someone, but if you write it down to not forget it, it’s suddenly not as valuable a gesture.

I never understood that.

I had a problem (bad memory), I cared enough to find, and create a solution, and consistently use and maintain it, it’s way more work that I’m putting in to make sure I remember things about the people I care about vs just having it memorized better than another person by the virtue of my genetics.

This is not a criticism or a shot at smugglerFlynn here though, they already said they’re not the target audience. It’s just my personal experience and this looked like a good starting thread to post it under.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#62

Post by spockz »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #55
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-...

Can't help but notice that this line is not true anymore in 2026: > It’s harder to read code than to write it.

> It’s harder to read -bad- code than to write -good- code.

There. Fixed it for you.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#63

Post by Waterluvian »

solarkraft wrote: post #39
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.

What’s cynical about this? Everybody is modernizing their codebases for agentic development.

Well, almost everybody.

Once I’m done integrating blockchain technology and minting NFTs, I’ll catch up to modernizing for agentic development.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#65

Post by kstrauser »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #57
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…

I am not the target audience for this product, but I can’t get over the irony of building a CRM specifically to track details about people you genuinely care about

My brain is not wired to remember certain details about people. I can have a conversation with them for an hour, truly engage with them and pay attention to what they say because I care to do so, and a week later remember almost nothing about the talk.

I have a Notes.app record listing my coworkers and the important things I want to remember about them. I wish I could remember all these things without writing it down, but I can't, even when it's important to me and something I'm genuinely interested in. Something like Monica to keep track of all those social details in an organized, completely private and self-hosted way, would be a godsend for me.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#66

Post by kstrauser »

FireBeyond wrote: post #29
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…

But then I also remember looking at Monica previously and deciding against it. And in reading this article, the author mentions that this will be v3 and one of the headline features will be: > This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them. Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person y…

> How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?

In the article's words:

> 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.

> I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for the new version, and I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact. It seems obvious to me now. It wasn't obvious when we designed the first versions of Monica.

Huh. Those sound like the sorts of things that sound trivial until you actually try to build them, and that they're re-engineering the model to correctly handle all the unusual edge cases.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#67

Post by edemdogbe »

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…

[flagged]

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#68

Post by koralatov »

theplatman wrote: post #12

why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/

The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.x, which presumably means this newly announced Monica 3 is Monica v6.x?

Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.x) was a bit of a disaster for Monica. The communication around it was confusing from the start: they stopped accepting pull requests for the original version to focus entirely on the new release – which then never materialised beyond betas. That killed development of the main version for a while, until they eventually started releasing minor v4.x updates alongside the v5.x betas.

On top of that, they said you might not be able to import data from Monica v1–v4 into Chandler/Monica 2 (v5) due to a database layout change. Reading that sort of killed my use of Monica as a product.

I’d been a heavy user up to that point, but the thought of burying my data in a version that might be abandoned soon really put me off.

I’d been a small but fairly consistent contributor before Chandler/Monica 2 was announced, but between the confusing roadmap and possible data migration barrier, I haven’t contributed since.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#69

Post by koralatov »

sikozu wrote: post #9

What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler? I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?

The version numbering here is an absolute mess. Chandler/Monica 2 is actually Monica v5.0.0-beta, which would logically mean that this newly announced Monica 3 is actually Monica v6.x.

Chandler/Monica 2 (v5.0.0-betas) never made it out of beta. It’s had five beta releases but no stable release. The stable 4.1.2 version is actually still the original Monica 1.

Re: We are rebuilding Monica

#70

Post by koralatov »

trashb wrote: post #21
alibrarydweller wrote: post #13

I'm a happy self-hosted Monica user, I like that I have alerts set to remind me of birthdays and other events, and that there's a place to list, e.g. everyone who got a Christmas card from me last year. I recommend it to people. I'm agnostic about a rewrite, I never used Chandler and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly serviceable for me the end user as it is. I rarely use the UI. I have been contemplating interac…

How did you spin up the self-hosted instance? Seems the self-hosting documentation is a bit... lacking. Both "self-hosting" buttons on the main page send me to "#". It seems interesting, even though I'm more of the roll your own school of thought here because there could be some very sensitive data in this system. https://docs-monicahq.vercel.app/docs/start/installation

Not the OP, but I use a little Debian machine to self-host. It’s fairly stable when running, but updates are dicey. It has too many dependencies and every major update has had some breakage that takes a while to fix.

My own instance is still on 4.0.0 despite 4.1.2 being out because I don’t see a benefit in updating and I don’t want to risk spending three or four hours hunting through yarn dependencies to undo an update that breaks things.

Post reply on HN