🔔 Update on the project

[djaiss]

Hi. Monica's team here.

The project is not dead. Far from it. In fact we've been working for a year and a half on Chandler, the code name of the brand new major version, and we push new code almost daily.

It's available here: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler

Since Monica is still a side project and we have full time jobs and families, we can't answer all the issues that you all create, even though we read them all. We need to prioritize what we do in our limited free time. This is why we put all our energy in creating a brand new experience with Chandler.

Chandler will address a lot of problems Monica has. Not all of them, but we hope it'll make you happy. It's also heavily unit-tested so we hope there will be less bugs. The dev stack remains mainly the same (Laravel (PHP) + VueJS + Mysql/SQLite/Postgre support), but we use Vue throughout the entire app, not just in some cases like we currently have in Monica. For the curious we use https://inertiajs.com to make it possible to use Vue with Laravel. Using Vue for the front end makes a user interface that feels really fast. The UI is also cleaner and more modern, while being sober.

We plan to move Chandler's code to this current repository. Why?

• we don't want to lose these precious Github stars, because we need some sort of meaningless gratifications as developers,
• we think it's easier for the community to have one point of reference about Monica instead of several repositories. Many users point to this repo directly, we don't want to dilute your attention.

Merging two repositories into one is a hard task, especially when we don't want to lose history of both commit trees. That'll be fun to do.

Before launching Chandler officially, we need to finish an exporter/importer. Chandler's codebase and data structure is completely different from Monica's. Right now, you couldn't import Monica's data into Chandler, so that would suck. We know it's an issue.

Chandler will be more focused on documenting your life, than being a personal CRM. While we kept most of all the current features Monica has, we've put a lot of effort on the journaling/personal diary feature. I mean, a lot of effort. Honestly I think we'll have one of the best journaling system out there and we really hope you'll like it.

So, please be patient. We'll post a new issue when Chandler is ready for testing.

With a lot of love, @djaiss and @asbiin. Thanks for being part of this community.

Below are some screenshots of Chandler, filled with fake data.

[slifty]

Totally makes sense regarding the preference for async.

Some thoughts, in no particular order, regarding communication:

1. Some FOSS projects I work on use Zulip. It is, itself, open source, and open source projects can have a free standard plan. It's a slightly different communication model than slack / discord as you have a "stream" of conversation (similar in scope to channels) that can contain different sub-"topics" within a given stream (similar in scope to threads).

I don't know if this tool would address the noise concerns, but one thing it definitely has that's better than Discord / Slack is that streams can be set up for "global read" which mean conversations can be linked to / read by people without an account. This is a nice way to avoid Discord Knowledge Rot, and I've found it to be a bit more suited for FOSS.

2. You could create a private github repository that exists solely to host internal discussions? I think you'd then have more granular control over who participates.

3. You could create a new section in the existing discussions section for the purposes of maintainer coordination to see how it goes; if noise becomes an issue there then you could look into other options with more granular access controls.

4. Email is fine too!

(I vote starting with using the existing discussions since it's the lowest overhead, and falling back to email for anything that requires privacy. Can evolve from there)

[phorcys420]

Hey all, first of all thanks for the heads up @djaiss.

I'd be glad to help where I can but we should probably take this to a more immediate type of discussion (e.g Discord, Slack, etc as already mentioned by others) to organize better.

Regarding the platform to use, I don't know if Zulip is a great choice, last time I used it I really hated the UX, maybe it changed though.

I think Discord is fine since a lot of FOSS communities are already on it but I think the best thing to do would be to set up a poll somewhere so we can decide on what to use.

[sylvainmetayer]

Thanks for the heads up @djaiss !

I'd love to help as I'm an active user on my self hosted v4 instance, and would love to run my own v5 instance.

To avoid multiplication of communication channel, I'd rather stay with a Github team inside the MonicaHQ organization and an asynchronous communication (also it would be easier to link issues/PR from my perspective), but if the majority of the community move somewhere else, I'd join the majority.

When this decision is made, I'd like to help to create bug report/testing the v5 and help through the self-hosted part.

[whysthatso]

just a comment regarding communication: use discussions, it's like a self building documentation, and a good place to move issues to that are not issues.

[MyNameisStitch]

@djaiss first off, thank you to both you and @asbiin for all of your hard work and your vision to create Monica. I'm an Aspie myself and this is the tool I've needed for so long and I want to help in any way I can. I'm not a coder (I only know enough to be dangerous lol) but I can help with beta testing, brainstorming ideas/processes, sorting through issues, anything I can do to help I'll do my best. I am self-hosting v4 currently.

I also agree with @whysthatso about using GitHub discussions. I frequently turn to the issues and discussions tabs when I'm troubleshooting issues.

[Xyz00777]

Hi im a little bit confused, is chandler now life? wouldnt it be than a good idea to close these issue? or is there an point in still letting it open which i dont see?

[nabby27]

Hello @djaiss, after reading this comment I am very sorry for what happened to you, I do not have such a large open source project but I can understand everything you say. It's a shame that despite having a project as cool as this and such an incredible community, you can't dedicate yourself 100% to the project. I recently launched a project called Opire that makes it easy to create rewards to solve issues, the good thing about Opire is that anyone can create rewards (not just you) in such a way that the community can economically help evolve the software. This way we can encourage other programmers to want to solve these issues. There are more advantages of using Opire that you can see in the documentation if you are interested. I know this isn't going to solve all the problems but at least I hope it can help a little. For now, I would like to put $100 through Opire in the issue that you consider best.

[RubenRuCh]

Hello @djaiss, after reading this comment I am very sorry for what happened to you, I do not have such a large open source project but I can understand everything you say. It's a shame that despite having a project as cool as this and such an incredible community, you can't dedicate yourself 100% to the project. I recently launched a project called Opire that makes it easy to create rewards to solve issues, the good thing about Opire is that anyone can create rewards (not just you) in such a way that the community can economically help evolve the software. This way we can encourage other programmers to want to solve these issues. There are more advantages of using Opire that you can see in the documentation if you are interested. I know this isn't going to solve all the problems but at least I hope it can help a little. For now, I would like to put $100 through Opire in the issue that you consider best.

Opire's co-founder here, and also an Aspie. I didn't know about this project before, but I can totally understand how it has been able to help other aspies and introverts folks. Discovering it has been great - I will totally try it out. I just had a very bad experience not remembering a neighbor's name and I had to deal with anxiety for a week cause of him getting mad about it 😅 I wish I had discovered Monica sooner.

I would like to contribute to Monica. As a developer (with some experience in PHP & Vue) I could help with the code, but realistically I already have too much in my plate, and you already have bad experience with people motivated about helping that end up disappearing. I could tackle some bugs and help with small maintenance issues, but definitely I can't compromise to be a proper maintainer - I just don't have enough time.

However, I'm willing to help by creating rewards myself in issues that you / the community consider as priority. Especially looking forward for those issues that will help to reduce the amount of attention that the project requires (bug fixes, maybe?). It's not a lot, but I would be able to put around ~$100 per month into funding rewards to encourage others devs to solve the issues.

I saw you have a Patreon. If you don't want to install Opire, that's fine - I'll set up a monthly donation to your Patreon. But I would prefer to fund specific issues to increase the amount of devs collaborating and reduce the pressure on you.

[Szeraax]

After this week's report of a year's long takeover attempt that was thwarted by a microsoft employee on xz utils, everyone in the open source world is probably scared of anything that looks like coordinated pressure on open source anything. Monetarily, socially, etc. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read this horrifying story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119342/xz-utils-linux-backdoor-attempt

Not trying to knock on opire specifically (never heard of it), but I'm just leery of external influence, especially recently.

[RubenRuCh]

Totally understandable @Szeraax!

However, tbh I'm glad the backdoor was tried through open-source - at least that way people like Andres Freund (the Microsoft employee) can check the source. Imagine if this was done in private code - the person/group behind the backdoor could have perfectly infiltrated an employee in the company to make the changes without going unnoticed, and then if someone realized about the 500ms lag they couldn't have investigated what caused it

Anyway, that's just my personal opinion - I still can understand everyone being scared

[slifty]

@djaiss @Szeraax I'm not sure if y'all started coordinating off line but in the event that it would be helpful to coordinate anything outside of this thread (in lieu of setting up discussions), my email is slifty@gmail.com.

I'd be glad to work with @Szeraax to help implement the setup of some discussion categories; I think the first step would be just taking a moment to level set on what your expectations would be @djaiss and how we can help things feel less overwhelming on your end.

[nabby27]

After this week's report of a year's long takeover attempt that was thwarted by a microsoft employee on xz utils, everyone in the open source world is probably scared of anything that looks like coordinated pressure on open source anything. Monetarily, socially, etc. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go read this horrifying story: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24119342/xz-utils-linux-backdoor-attempt

Not trying to knock on opire specifically (never heard of it), but I'm just leery of external influence, especially recently.

Hi @Szeraax I totally agree, I understand the concern and distrust (especially in a project that we have just launched) but to be fair we do not make changes directly to the code (nor do we want to influence what changes are made to the code) or even we do nothing that doesn't already exist, there are competitors like Algora.io or previously bountysource that do something similar.

What my colleague and I said is completely true, we want to help the project not only monetarily but also encourage issues to be solved since it's one of the problems that the maintainer mentioned and we simply believe that this tool can help and is the best for it.

Anyway, it was just a suggestion 😄

[Szeraax]

I have no authority here, so please don't think that my voice matters any more than yours does. What happens is up to the developers.

Personally, I'm more interested in the comment by Slifty about updates on community management and hearing how the developers think the community can help them with the community management side of this awesome project.

[slifty]

@djaiss no stress, but wanted to ping here again in case you had interest in moving forward on exploring what more community involvement could look like.

[Xav-v]

Same here, I'm ready to give some support, so let me know if any updates

[naiba]

@djaiss I read the whole post, I have an open source project with 6k stars myself, I would love to add lunar calendar support in monica v5 in an extensible way, which will also support Buddhist calendar users, my suggestion is that we have an instant chat group to gather developers who are capable and want to contribute. Although I closed the PR after adding lunar calendar support in v4 because I didn't get a response for a long time, I still pay attention to this project in the past few years.

[tmuras]

Hi All,

I am big fan, user and Patreon supporter since 2018. Thank you @djaiss for all the work you've done here. It is much appreciated.

Looks like the project needs some help now. If you are interested in helping (whatever it means) and you have some spare time and availability to work on the project mid- and long-term then please drop me an email to my Google account : nexor1984 . I will organize a call and mailing list where we can decide how to best help Mazarin and the project.

[hycday]

Is it still possible to work with the 5.x version of Monica? Whenever I run the docker compose with the url of ghcr.io/monicahq/monica-next:chandler it "manifest unknown" errors out and when using ghcr.io/monicahq/monica-next:main it deploys the 4.x or stable release. Love to try the Chandler version in docker but I'd love to learn where to find the image?

tried with this one, or the other link you gave (https://hub.docker.com/r/k714040/monica , which gives me an error) and in all cases, i get to install version 4.xx not 5.x :(

therefore i'm really unsure how to get it to work and would love to, so if anyone has some idea please share

[Szeraax]

@hycday my beta Chandler was working last i checked. You should post a new bug report so that you have a dedicated thread for getting support. Be sure to include your docker compose file so we can review. Feel free to tag me when you post too and I'll be sure to take a look

[Szeraax]

@djaiss Hycday's comment here is a perfect example of what community managers can help with. I went ahead and told them to go file in an appropriate place so that they can get support without clogging up this channel with off-topic discussion. Because I'm not a community manager, I will admit that I went outside of my scope of authority as a fellow consumer by telling Hyc not to clog up this channel.

Hyc opened #7333 and since it was a simple question, I was able to provide and answer and I bet the issue will be solved soon. If you have some community managers, they can help keep communication organized where you want it, even if you're wanting something like "All beta issues should go in this thread until further notice!"

[hycday]

i can confirm :) the solution worked (one minor open point which i cannot find in the documentation but i made a followup in the ticket) but besides that, it helped me (thanks again @Szeraax )

i'm hoping for some import/export features so that i can feel more at ease with a beta solution, but otherwise, quite happy with what im seeing in the demo, it's really amazing ! you deserve some funding as this is by far the best solution for a rolodex (and actually, seems like the only one) and it can be self-hosted... amazing

[VickyRampin]

I am wondering if this issue should be closed, since Chandler has been read-only for about a year at this point and this issue is pinned and directing people there?

[Pamalosebi]

I keep coming back to this post to see what will happen to Monica. But honestly... I am losing hope in this project. When this happened with paperless-ng, the community went ahead and created a -ngx version. But I am not even sure if there is enough interest in Monica as a project.

It is really sad, because there is really not a single proper alternative for this project out there. And the idea of Monica is fantastic.

[jskherman]

@VickyRampin @djaiss I'm a little bit confused. There's this issue, https://github.com/monicahq/chandler/issues/558, that says that it has moved to the chandler branch for this repo but I only see two gh-readonly-queue/chandler/ branches and no chandler exactly. Is 5.x supposed to be the chandler branch?

[tmuras]

I have the same feelings about the project @Pamalosebi . I'm trying to gather some people interested in continuing the work but so far there are only 3 of us. If you'd like to join, drop me an email at nexor1984 in google domain.

[Pamalosebi]

I am really not a dev @tmuras. I am more from the ops side. I don't think I can be of much help. I can only try to get involved with the community in other ways. Like testing deployments or something.

[stanleyshly]

Hi all. Just to check, when you say the project is dying, can you clarify what you mean? I'm currently using the beta docker version, the last version was published 2 months. For those of us who don't follow development as closely, what is happening there?

[Pamalosebi]

Do you feel that the project is in a healthy, thriving state? 🤔 @stanleyshly

[slifty]

@Pamalosebi I don't think @stanleyshly was asking a rhetorical question, but a genuine one.

They don't have enough information to know if the project is in a healthy, thriving state, which is why they asked what they asked!

---

@stanleyshly unfortunately right now the core maintainers of the project are a bit mental blocked on engaging with it; they put out a call for help in March. A few community members offered to step in, but it's been several months and nobody's been empowered to do so.

New features aren't really being added, or merged in, and v5 is seriously lacking some very important things (e.g. support for profile pictures / files, as well as the ability to prevent new registrations).

All this is to say, it's not clear what the future of monica looks like, and it won't be clear until either the community decides:

1. it is time to attempt to fork the project and develop a separate branch (this is a big decision and in order to be successful would need intentionality and a solid core team with a common vision)

or

2. the original maintainers pick a few folks to empower in various ways to keep things moving.

My hope is still that 2 happens, though hope is all I can do!

[influjensbahr]

I only recently found this project and am using it quite a bit, it's a great help that can be super helpful with a few fixes and new features. It seems like there are a lot of people active here. What's stopping us from being active with the issues tracked (like tagging/commenting/helping) and submitting pull requests as fixes? Are pull requests currently not reviewed by anyone?

What's the thing that's blocking this projects? It doesn't seem to be a lack of people wanting to help out.

[caesarshift]

As a new user (self-hosting), I'm also unsure of what to do. The docker project (I believe) uses v4, but now that I know that Chandler (v5) is the future, I'm hesitant to start using either v4 or v5 without a clear direction. In my opinion, the data migration shouldn't be a blocker. Finish MVP for v5 THEN worry about data migrations. The bigger issue is the pausing of all development on both branches. Paralysis of analysis is going to kill both versions.

[max-kibosh]

Putting in my two cents here, to reinforce public interest. I'm in the same situation as @caesarshift - v4 is a great tool and helper, tried out v5 locally and it's such a great step in the right direction and exactly what I'm looking for, but obviously still lacking crucial functionality.

What some other teams have done (e.g. Gitea, HomeAssistant and others) is open a Discord server. Imo, this can streamline communication, encourage interaction and provide great ways of getting the (scattered) community going.

I really don't want to see this project die, especially since v5 looks so promising!

[JoshuaBehrens]

Please do not move communication to a private (as in non searchable/indexable) gated community. This will make this place even less active. GitHub is already a collaboration tool with public communication like this.

[millette]

I'm with @JoshuaBehrens, please keep the discussions going here on GitHub. Discord is not an option for me and many people I know.