Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc. • Hacker News Board

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#71

Post by floatingatoll » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #49

floatingatoll wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds luxurious to have the capability to “just” remember these things. After decades of being alive, I can tell you with certainty that my mom’s birthday is one of two days each year, but I have no idea which of those two days it is. We get along famously and I’m welcome at any time, because she loves me for who I am, not for what I cannot do: remember her birthday correctly. I think she’d be more shocked that I…

I'm still in my late 20s and have admittedly not yet experienced everything the world has to offer. Thanks for sharing your story!

I would definitely understand if it isn’t like this for everyone, too!

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#72

Post by Volundr » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

vonseel wrote: post #64

hisnameisjimmy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get this thinking, but I am oriented totally differently from you. I will forget my friend's birthdays, their kids names, their wife's names, things they've talked about recently, etc, etc. I have a terrible memory for this stuff. I'm not sure if it's just me being stubborn, but all of these things just feel very slippery to my mind. On the other end, I will remember in vibrant detail very trivial facts tha…

You won't forget the names when it matters. If you can't remember these basic details, it's a sign that person is not close enough to you for it to actually matter. Or, maybe you're like me and you just met the person five minutes ago. Either case is forgivable.

I'm afraid your experience is not universal. There are plenty of people I care very deeply about, yet Facebook reminding me of their birthdays is a godsend. Children I do somewhat better with, but names are always a struggle for me. A friend had triplets a couple months into the pandemic, and I'm still struggling there. Meanwhile a the drop of a hat I can bring to mind some technical detail that I heard once a decade ago and never used.

People's minds work differently, just because something comes easily to you does not mean it does to everyone else.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#73

Post by BiosElement » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #37

Not sure if this was already argued elsewhere as I understand that monica gets posted here frequently, but on the readme: > This project is for people who have hard time remembering details about other people's lives - especially the ones they care about. My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship da…

As someone who is utterly awful with names but genuinely remembers people I interact with through the day on campus and at work, Dynalist was what I used to keep track of names with references to where I knew them from. Just whatever would spark my memory.

It wasn't that I didn't care about them, I truly did, but I frequently mix up names of even my closest friends if I'm not paying attention and make great effort to not give others the impression I don't care enough to remember.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#74

Post by BiosElement » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #47

scipio_orleans wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them You mean like the effort of writing it down? I see nothing ingenuine about understanding your cognitive limits and working around them to show that you care. > I've met maybe 1000 people in my lifetime, I could count in my ten fingers the people I care about. Can people actually care about other people, AT SCALE, to the point where you would need an app…

I think it's a noble goal to genuinely care about more poeple. > Like if I can pull up something from the last convo that'd help. I can relate to this. Every time I'm alone with someone, my brain goes to overdrive and I ask myself questions like "what can we talk about" , "what common interests do we have", "how can I make him/her laugh", "what about this person that I don't know yet that I can ask" just to 'develop'…

For what it's worth, the answer "Who cares" is I do. Personally, I don't want to be the jerk who can't be bothered to remember names, so I choose to care.

Having said that, as long as you're not a jerk about it, which I don't think you are, I think it's personally fine to admit you've forgotten my name and ask, I'm not that memorable! :)

I think this just shows the value differences we each have from our upbringing and mentors, so it's very interesting.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#75

Post by cweagans » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:09 AM UTC

hysan wrote: post #31

Have they implemented CardDAV support yet? I’d definitely add it to my self-hosted stack, but I don’t want to be stuck updating contact info in two places.

Yes! They also added CalDAV for birthdays and tasks.

https://github.com/monicahq/monica/blob/master/docs/user/car...

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#76

Post by Spearchucker » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:10 AM UTC

First thought after seeing the screen shot was "whoa way too much whitespace." Second thought was that I do all of this in Outlook, and get world-class email, calendar, tasks/todo and notes with it. Also importantly, all my data is both online and off, and there's a non-intrusive app for all the deives I use. Security is also world class.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#77

Post by executesorder66 » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

Is there anyone that has used this for some time who is willing to share how/if this has made any impact on their life? I'm just curious how well this works. Would anyone recommend it?

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#78

Post by rriepe » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

movedx wrote: post #58

galaxyLogic wrote: post #56

I would love to have a social media platform where I can have multiple tiers of friends. Social Media "friends" and separately a circle of ACTUAL friends. You would get more access to the data shared by actual friends. The best part of it would be that unlike in a CRM I wouldn't have to keep this data up-to-date. My (actual) friends would update their own data, only. Everybody would need to only keep their own data w…

> I would love to have a social media platform where I can have multiple tiers of friends. Social Media "friends" and separately a circle of ACTUAL friends. You would get more access to the data shared by actual friends. "Um, /u/galaxyLogic? Why aren't I in you "ACTUAL" friends list? Is there something you want to tell me? Are we not actually friends?" I see what you're trying to say - Facebook friends are often just…

It was taxing even before this. Welcome to the site! Now choose who your real friends are.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#79

Post by tomgs » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:13 AM UTC

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread.

Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working.

Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of software made all the difference re keeping up with people. The e-mail notifications is a killer feature - so simple, yet I've never done it before in my personal inbox.

I think the fact that it's an external service and not inside your inbox matters from a UX perspective. I have this other place where I define the logic, and then receive it in the screen I look at every morning.

Originally came to know of the project years back through https://sive.rs/hundreds, and while he's a bit better (a lot better) at it than I am, I can confidently say I've stayed in touch with dozens of people thanks to Monica. His notion of "ranked lists" also makes sense, at least to me, as a mental framework for managing personal contacts.

Shameless plug (for the creators!): I 100% recommend Monica, have contributed to it, and am a big big supporter of https://github.com/djaiss (Regis), https://github.com/asbiin (Alexis), et al.

They're actively working on something new now, so if that helps them somehow - link incoming:

https://www.officelife.io/

A personal comment: There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.

Example: Say I met someone years ago at school, and I thought she was pretty cool. I added her to Monica and I reach out to her once in a while to see what's up. We talk about work, exchange some personal stories, and go our separate ways. I might not think about her for months at a time, but then - quite intentionally - I think about her when the email notification comes up. It makes me happy that this person is somehow in my life.

Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.

If it works, right?

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#80

Post by angry_octet » Wed, Dec 02, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

neolog wrote: post #39

angry_octet wrote: post #25

Offering this as a hosted instance is tantamount to conspiracy to enable identity theft, and worse. These things just shouldn't be chucked into someone's S3 bucket or SQL database.

You've been downvoted, but it does seem like a high risk for information security.

Everyone loves to preach ethics and accountability but I think lots of people in tech secretly dislike the constraints. Or not so secretly if they work at fb.

For everything you do, you should consider "what if this is used by the worst person to target the most vulnerable people?" Stalker exes, online scammers, insurance companies, 4chan wieners, toxic MRAs, data brokers working for PIs etc. Assume an open S3 bucket with data from 5000 users. Imagine how much identify theft and intimate partner violence that could enable.