The original ShowHN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

I'd love to hear experiences of using Monica. I've been hesitant to try it out mostly due to my own ignorance of how to get existing data in there and get it into a usable state. But I love the concept.

After screaming into my pillow about the recent Facebook f**ery and the destruction of the individual and their relationships, I had a moment of appreciation and human-ness when I read, "Built because my memory is bad.; I created Monica because I kept forgetting details about people I genuinely cared about."

That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.

I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".

And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.

/rant

They lost me when they threw everything out and moved to Chandler. Now they're throwing everything out again. I love the idea, maybe it's time to vibecode an alternative.

I read this article and the subtext in my head is “I pointed Claude at my ten year old code in a sandbox and it couldn’t handle adding the features I wanted. So for v3 I will make it better for agentic development.”

I’ve become so cynical this year.

I'll take "things you should never do" for $1000 Alex.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

What I'm confused about with Monica is this being v3. Didn't Monica already get rebuilt from the original version in 2017, since there's a beta software called Chandler?

I know very little about the Monica ecosystem but how come you're throwing away a second version as well? What were the flaws in that iteration?

I tried out Monica when it was posted to hn ages ago and still get the occasional reminder. But I've mostly switched to using the contacts app on my iphone for everything. It has primitive features that support 95% of what I need.

why aren't mentioning their failed rewrite from 3 years ago? https://www.monicahq.com/en/blog/chandler-is-in-beta/