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?

In the past I've been using many tools for managing all kinds of data. In the 90s MS Access for creating personal database "apps". In the 2000s various CRM solutions (desktop-based, self-hosted and hosted; among others Act CRM, SugarCRM, Highrise). Also, extensively used a self-hosted version of Confluence as a personal wiki (yeah, way to heavy for the goal). And then also many many PIM tools for managing personal notes, contact data and notes.

I have seen many tools come and go. Many of them have high maintenance costs in the long run, especially if you decide to use a self-hosted version. But even if you decide to pay for the hosted version: Your data is stuck in someone elses solution.

Finally, I come to realize, that no matter how shiny and beautiful an interface might seem, in the end the long-term accessibility and the ability to keep and own my data is much more important than anything else.

Now I keep most of my essential data in plain text-files, albeit in a structured way (in org-mode + Emacs). Emacs + Lisp are just wonderful: I can write some code in Emacs Lisp to create the perfect workflow, for all kinds of use-cases (meeting notes, contact data, overviews in ascii-tables, text-files dedicated for certain contacts, structured in org-mode and many more).

I tend to think that Emacs + Org + plain-text will be here in fifty years from now, when all other shiny solutions are replaced by the latest trends du-jour. Feels good to liberate my data.

The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users.

I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to user’s data - it stays completely within the Apple ecosystem.

I have also taken a mobile-first approach, I think that focus reduced some of the installation and maintenance barriers for users. With the iOS app there’s no deployment or setup cost for users. Personal interactions (chat) and data (contacts, calendars) are already managed through our phones, so the iOS app also seems to be a natural fit for other reasons.

I hope to see more products/projects where the users data, monetization, and developer incentives align. It’s great to see an open source PRM project that matches those incentives.

It seems like a tough business model, to try to sell a one-off utility like this. Over a 50 year lifetime, that's $4,500.

It feels like in the eighties, I'd pay $20 (which is $40 in today's dollars) for a shareware tool, and it'd do this for the rest of my life (or until my 80286 running DOS became obsolete, whichever came first).

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 which they want their actual friends to see up-to-date.

This is an organized list and comparison of Personal CRMs.

The reason I ask this question is to figure out if it’s worth trying or not. On another forum, I’d asked about self hosting Ghost (the publishing platform) and someone said that it’s a pain to keep up with it and that the makers of the software have made it in a way that the hosted solution would be preferred by potential users.

However, I've since stopped using it because the upgrades did fuck it up more than once I think and it was too slow to add information, too much friction.

I've since started using markdown files edited in Sublime and synced over Dropbox. Quick, no maintenance overhead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867741

I've always wanted to create something like this myself. Glad to see someone do it.

It's like - I don't want a TODO app when I can create simple Note with checkboxes.

Brain + contact info on your computer/phone + calendar with reminders for birthdays etc. + pencil and paper for notes catches the most important things but allows us to forget the less important things.

For privacy, the app stores information locally on-device only. Sync of contacts via phone, Google mail or calendar is possible. Contact information is streamed to the device rather than stored on a server.

> 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 database?

I've tried something similar to this during my college days. I painstakingly inputted all my phone contacts to google contacts. I searched their facebook for their birthdates, what university they were attending and what degree they were studying.

Looking back at it now, that was a tremendous waste of time. 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 for that? I've read in other comments, one case in particular, where an uncle kept a spreadsheet of facts about the people he cared about, and that many people went to his funeral. So fine maybe people do need something like this to scale personal relationships.

My other argument is that this FEELS ungenuine, and I'm not sure how else to explain it. Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday; I feel like there is a huge gap between the two. I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

What do you think?

However, I was never able to successfully upgrade it (circa 2018) and therefore moved on to another option because I needed features unavailable and the effort of migrating my data to a new instance was more than the effort of going elsewhere.

Might be time for me to revisit as it looks to have come a long way.

> We are like you, and this is why we are on GitHub: we hate big corporations that do not have at heart the best interest at heart for their users, even if they say otherwise.

That's definitely what I think of when I think Microsoft!

I've started just using Google Contacts for this. It syncs and integrates with all my devices, supports birthday reminders, relations and custom fields, and has a general purpose note taking area for gifts and other details.

I only wish the custom fields were more powerful/versatile and that the relations could be hyperlinked with other contacts instead of being just text fields.

Amicu is basically SwiftUI on top of a local SQLite db. It supports tracking the last contact date, catchup reminders, birthday reminders, Siri, Shortcuts (for semi automatic workflows), and widgets. Save the main comm app per contact (WhatsApp, Telegram, FB, etc.) for batch messages like a birthday event invite.

Feedback is welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1481868897

I tend to think back of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and there's an entire chapter devoted to what is basically an analog CRM and devoting time to staying up to date with it (including scheduling calls).

If anything I think a CRM applies even more because I care more about friends and family than I do about a sales pipeline. More effort = more importance, in my book.

Also there's the added bonus of not having to remember these things so I can focus on remembering more useful things.

I think of it like this. I don't pay attention to lyrics in most music, I pay attention to the feel/tune. With friends, it's all about emotional connection, not my ability to recall facts. I honestly don't think one or the other is better or worse, it's just different. People show care differently.

For me, who has trouble with things that people often associate with caring (like yourself maybe), this acts as a crutch to help me show caring in a way that other people recognize but that isn't natural to me. I would actually argue that me investing into a program like this actually shows just how much I care that I want to make up for my natural capability with a pretty involved program.

Another side benefit, it's also really nice for acquaintances that you really want to keep up with, but because of irregular correspondence they are very easy to slip from memory.

You might be both overthinking it, and overestimating some of the people who would use this.

I put friends birthdays in my Google calendar. It's not because I don't care about them enough to remember it. It's because I care enough to work around my own failings for them.

I think she’d be more shocked that I was able to remember it than she would mind at all if I kept notes about her so I could remember. I think she would take immense personal offense if I did so using something terrible like Facebook, as would most in my family — but if I’m keeping it local to myself alone, I don’t expect it would be any trouble at all. She trusts that by now I’m competent at the Internet, because she watched me learn how to do my computer jobs as a young child.

I would be the topic of the day at a family gathering for doing this, though! We would all hash out the entire thing in lurid detail over meals and walks. Some would ask to see their records, and I’d happily comply. If I didn’t feel strongly about them, I wouldn’t bother taking notes at all, and they all understand the family rule: only ask questions you truly wish to know the answer to. If they can’t handle what I relegate to a notebook about them, then they shouldn’t ask to read my notebook about them. This is obvious to us. It’s a simple extension of the family rule.

Maybe your social circles are different and less flexible on this matter, but that’s not at all how it would work for mine.

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 for that?

Well I'd like to work on caring about more people. I think with personal CRMS it might help expand out my pool of and push conversations past the same ole small talk each time. Like if I can pull up something from the last convo that'd help.

It’s a weird equation of care and ability while at the same time taking someone seeking out a tool to better achieve X as evidence of not caring about X. One of those connections seems arbitrary to me, the other backwards.

In the same way, perhaps it's the case that if you remember more about more people then you will care more about more people? Certainly, making the effort to remember would suggest you care to begin with and wish for that to grow.

One way of showing you care is making the effort to remember important things. Another is staying in contact. I’ve used Anki to remember friends kids names, and Monica to remind me to stay in touch. Very occasionally, I use Monica to remember where a friend is in their life last we spoke. Often a tiny cue is enough to jog your memory.

You might consider that “unauthentic”, but I would say people’s brains and memories are just really different —- what’s easy for you is not necessarily easy for everyone else. Using these tools let’s me be closer to the type of friend, brother, son that I’d like to be.

I should add, having moved overseas, Monica has also helped me maintain relationships with people who are very important to me, but who I may only get the chance to speak to every few weeks, or less. I’m quite grateful for it.

I mean aren't you going to have to write it down somewhere anyway? Maybe you're not familiar with the world of journaling/notebooks, but people use them (and have been using them) for the same purpose. Before technology, people still wrote information down about the people they cared about.

> Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday

I mean if you're taking the time to write it down I think that demonstrates a level of genuineness. It's not always possible to e.g. have the foresight 3 months in advance to say "ah I can't do that because my friend's child's birthday is then".

>I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

I think authenticity has a lot more to do with experiences you have with a person, which is augmented by making sure you're available to spend time with them on important dates, having awareness of their likes and dislikes, and just taking note of general information. I find that, personally, when I take the time to write these things down, I actually keep them in 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.

Let’s turn this around: if a friend wishes you a happy birthday, do you know or care how and why they remembered?

I would say you're looking at it completely wrong and you don't have to forget somebodies birthday that many times before you write it down because all it does is hurt everybody. Some segment of the population forgets these things EVEN WITH the inner circle of people they know.

You and others probably have a much better memory than I.

I don't use tools though, we have a physical birthday calendar that helps.

A Personal Relationship Manager feels like something that would be used against you in a jury trial. Not any specific information entered into it, just the fact alone that you were using it.