I picked day one up as a journaling app many years ago, and have enjoyed it. But I’ve now mostly left the apple ecosystem and I’m ready for a new solution. An important feature to me is the calendar view that both shows you what days you have entries for and allows you to see previous year’s entries on a day. The lack of this feature knocks out the most recommended alternatives on this community (joplin, obsidian, and logseq come to mind). Journey cloud and diarium are strong picks, but I’d prefer non proprietary and stronger self hosting support. Along with better platform availability. Memoria is also in consideration, but the documentation is pretty light and it’s hard to tell if it will function in the way I expect. Likewise with memos, which I’ve seen suggested on here.
Needs:
- Usable on linux (I can live with a web app)
- Calendar view showing days with entries
- Encryption
- Cloud sync functionality (no local only apps like rednotebook)
Nice to haves:
- Proper app for linux, android, ios
- Ability to import a day one backup, preserving my 5 or so years of journal history
- FOSS
- Selfhostable
- Support for media (primarily photos)
- Prompts for password on every launch
- Equivalent to “on this day” feature allowing you to view previous entries on a day
You can sync Obsidian with your own storage location. There are plugins to do a lot of what you’re asking for. Downside is that it’s not open source, though your content is all stored in plaintext so you won’t lose it due to lock-in. It also might be more than your asking for and a simpler, more tailored, solution may be out there. Paired with a self hosted Nextcloud server, you may solve a bunch of your PIM needs at once.
Syncthing is another nice option for syncing Obsidian notes.
You’ll want to use Syncthing-fork on Android.
Yeah obsidian’s pretty nice. I use the daily notes feature built into it for my journal.