Ask HN: Social Relationship Management App? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Social Relationship Management App?

13 pointsDenisM16 comments

I looking for an SRM - a CRM for social connections.

Specifically I want write down and browse thing I know about a person - name, photo, how we met, basic facts, likes and dislikes, important dates, when we talked last and what about, when we should talk next and what’s going to happen in their life in that time, that sort of things.

This doesn’t have to be fancy. Anything better than the yellow sticky notes I use now would be an improvement. Maybe just a list of entries, hashtags, and alerts or timeline / calendar view.

Ideally this would not hold my data hostage but would instead hold a local database that syncs across devices.

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Monica sounds like what you're looking for, and it can be self-hosted.

https://github.com/monicahq/monica

Thank you! That looks like what I needed.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for a little while, and it blows my mind that this is still a largely unsolved problem. We could be doing so much better with contact management:

- present it more beautifully, and easier to categorize contacts (people I haven’t talked to in 3 months, people I went to college with, etc) - Pull data from multiple sources, email, social media, and databases to keep the contact updated automatically. Make suggestions - do the above with a plug-in infrastructure so modules can be made for any service. - non destructive editing, with history. - add a social component, remind me to contact people. - present reports on who I contact, use AI in my text messages and emails to determine what kind of relationship I have.

On and on. Instead I have google contacts, which is like 5-10 minute to update a stale contact and ensure the fields are correct.

Seriously? This is the best we can come up with?

I’ve tried Monica, and frankly it isn’t good. It doesn’t solve any problem that isn’t solved by the default contact app on my phone.

I might try to fix this by building a solution to this, I don’t even think it would be that hard to do.

Also DIDs, or some kind of decentralized keybase system would be nice.

Not perfect, but in addition to contact management, Google Contacts has many of the functions you are looking for, including birthday, Custom fields (so you can add likes / dislikes), freeform notes, related people, Custom events (so you can add anniversary, important dates, etc)

All the dates you add (including custom ones) will show up on your Google Calendar automatically.

Using WordPress, I run a personal website (not public) to manage a variety of things for myself. This includes a daily journal entry, RSS feeds, habit trackers, and so on. I also have a Rolodex which functions the same way as your desired SRM. For that, I just use a forms plugin (Gravity Forms) and then display the data on a specific WordPress page. The form allows me to input name, photo, bio, etc.

Ideally this would not hold my data hostage but would instead hold a local database that syncs across devices.

Doing it yourself via WordPress more-or-less accomplishes the same thing.

It seems you have installed a lot of plugins or otherwise did many customizations to wp. Do you have a walkthrough by chance?

I didn’t do too many customizations. I’m just using a form plugin, of which there are many. If you Google “how to display form data on WordPress” you’ll see a few guides. You just have to create a form with fields for all of your desired data (name, photo, etc.) and then submit an entry for each person you meet.

If I remember correct it’s exists some local first Notion alternatives. You could also try folk.app or wobaka.com

Just want to say I find it disarming bordering on reassuring when I meet up with an acquaintance who has forgotten quite a bit about me. Because I’ve usually forgotten the quite a bit about them :). It’s just human. And if they remembered too much I might be mildly concerned.

Acquaintance maybe, but sometimes I want to keep a close relationship and my memory was transplanted from a goldfish.

You can probably build something on top of emacs org-mode? (And I half-assume someone already did.)

Bbdb might be the better starting point.

Not sure if it work for you, but take a look at Orbit - https://orbit.love/. Is this what you are looking for?

Looking at the home page I see nothing even remotely related. Are you sure it’s the right link? Where should I look for relevant details?

I think Evernote would be a good option.

Evernote, Org-mode, Obsidian, ...

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