Show HN: Jørnal, a journaling app where the page is always blank

Journaling in the digital world quickly becomes editing or second-guessing what to write. Freedom is bad. So I flipped it: as a side project I've been working on a simple journaling app where the page is always blank, and what you write is immutable.

It tries super hard to always keep whatever you write and never lose your words. The editor of course always stores in local storage to guard against accidental tab closes; there's a queue that lets you write offline and drains it on the backend; idempotency guarantees uniqueness and eventual consistency. As a bonus to me the developer, having immutable entries makes cross-device synchronization trivial.

You can use it without an account, but you can sign in with Google or GitHub SSO or get emailed a magic link if you want access to your writing across devices.

Entries are slightly obfuscated at rest, but not encrypted—I've been too scared of losing the master key. I'm considering adding E2EE as an option for users who understand what they're doing, but it's a hard UX problem to communicate the risk properly (you're responsible for the key and I can't help you if you lose it).

It also supports semantic search over all your previous entries: when you hit ctrl/cmd+enter to submit, a background task runs that embeds each paragraph with Hugging Face transformers + ONNX runtime and stores the results in Postgres. Did you know Postgres has built in support for querying vectors by cosine similarity? Literally an index for that!

Then I got scope creeped because I thought it was cool, so I added the same for photos: CLIP embedding does the same thing for semantic search in visual space. (works better in English, I struggled to find models that worked for multiple languages that worked with this setup)

The embeddings run locally on my server. No AI providers or anything, nothing leaves the server ever.

The app is free, but I added a $4/month to help run the server. As mentioned, just a side project, I have but a single paid user.

(The curly twirlys turned out to be a very fun generative art project, probably spent way too much time on that part.. it's not even my style! (as a median age, median gender, median weight software developer) But I thought they fit the vibe I was going for. If anyone's interested I can share the maths and the working out.)