Day One, the Journaling App, Joins Automattic | Hacker News Reader

Day One, the Journaling App, Joins Automattic

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63 pointsnsriv23 comments

Day One is such a big part of my life that this acquisition makes me very worried about its future. It's been gradually getting more aggressive with pushing people into subscriptions, and while I'm still on the grandfathered plan that can use sync without subscription, it makes me worried that I might have to migrate my entire 4-5 years of journal data to something else soon...

Ultimately, if the data isn't on your hardware, parsable by open source software, there's always a chance a corporate move could imperil it.

Luckily day one is fully e2ee encrypted, otherwise I wouldn’t trust their self baked sync service a bit

I relied very heavily on Day One until they dropped most of their local-hosting features. It was painful and I still haven't found any comparable alternative.

Wow, I didn't realize they did that... I've had Day One suggested to me many time and always resisted, I guess I'm glad I did. I don't know what I want as an alternative, though - I guess what would be ideal is something that is Desktop/Mobile, syncs markdown to a shared filesystem like Dropbox, and has lots of optional bells and whistles for cataloguing and organization that I wouldn't mind losing since I'd still have the actual content in markdown.

I tried. There isn’t one. Dyrii was decent. But it was abandoned. There’s Journey (with their cluttered and poor interface) but they’ve not been able to pull themselves out of Google’s sink-hole. Even after you login with Apple Login they ask you to add a Google Drive account to sync data.

So I literally just moved back to pen and paper. Something I had been doing since school (school school). I haven’t missed any journaling app since. But having one would be nice.

How about Joplin? (https://joplinapp.org/)

Great idea. Joplin is a really good note taking app, open source, free and you can easily sync it via webdav.

It's not a journaling app per se, but you could use it for that.

The mobile apps are not perfect yet though.

Still running an 8 year old version for that reason. Tried switching to MacJournal once it became free but kept going back.

Same. I still use the old app on my iPhone. Syncing to Dropbox and iCloud no longer works. I periodically export to pdf as a backup. I have nine years of notes in that pdf.

At some point an iOS update is going fully break the app, but I'm still hanging on.

You should actually be very happy. Given Automattic's track record, it might become free.

that was my first thought too. I've messed about with their import / export features but found them a bit lacking. so either this means it goes wrong and I get a decent export option developed or it gets better and I stay there but also get a better export option for backups!

While I generally do not like subscriptions, surely “sync” falls into the category of “well of course that is a subscription”?

Someone must maintain a server indefinitely for you to sync whenever you want. That is a continuous cost that also has a scale factor, e.g. based on number of users. Without revenue proportional to that cost (e.g. per user), how can it be expected to remain functional?

I think the distaste for Day One’s subscription stems from the fact that an update removed the ability to sync on the user’s platform of choice (iCloud or Dropbox) which they were already paying for, and forced them into the first-party service.

They also have Simplenote. I think they also own or owned Tumblr.

Other than privacy (which I guess didn’t change for better) I think Simplenote has been better with them. Improved.

It’s pretty much the only note taking service left out there that supports stable and fast plain text note taking and has other supported third party apps - especially native apps; unlike alternatives which have electron wrappers and no third party apps.

> That doesn’t mean that everything you journal has to stay private, though.

Not trying to take it out of context but not very exciting thing to read to be honest :)

>I think they also own or owned Tumblr

Automattic currently owns Tumblr.

I love simplenote. I used keep before and simplenote is so much better

Give minimal.app a try - independent + top-quality.

If it’s not available in your country, try minimal.app/#beta.

This is my app, I use it extensively, and it is a delight to design, build, and share with other people obsessed with thoughtful design.

Looks like it's apple only. Is that correct?

To be fair Day One might as well be Apple only because the Android app doesn’t even support E2E encryption.

I switched to Journey for quite some time now. Mostly because it is way cheaper, and also has a windows application.

In addition it allows to export all entries (docx & pdf) and it can import from Day One.

The user experience is mediocre though, and there is no e2e encryption!

https://journey.cloud

After 8 years of using DayOne I am a bit worried. Automattic may try to squeeze out profits by introducing new, more expensive tears or by limiting the existing ones. On the other side, the development of DayOne is not that fast anymore, though I consider it mostly being feature-complete. However, a client for Windows/Android would make sense.

I export my diaries on a regular basis as a plain-text and I am often thinking that it would be better to build such a system in emacs journal, where it would be platform-agnostic and where I would not have to be worried after another 10 years. The problem is always how to journal on the phone and how to insert videos and photos in the phone.

Interesting. Been using day one for years. Wonder how this will impact the app.

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