The journal I needed: a private place for the things that fit nowhere

There are always things we don't tell anyone.

We have parents, spouses, close friends. Still, some things don't seem to fit with any of them. Nothing dramatic, usually. A worry that sounds silly out loud. A small happiness that might sound like bragging. A question that has been sitting there for years. They stay in the heart, and because we forget easily, after a while they are just gone.

A long time ago those things went into a diary in a drawer. At some point the drawer disappeared, and somehow I stopped writing.

This summer I started building something to bring it back, mostly for myself. I suppose I was the first customer. Whenever I wasn't sure about a decision, I asked myself one thing: would I actually open this?

What follows is roughly how those decisions went, with a few practical notes for anyone who wonders whether to trust it.

Somewhere nobody reads

If I'm going to write the real thing, I think I need to be sure nobody reads it. Not someone who breaks in, not the company, and ideally not even the person running the server, which in this case is me.

So the first big decision was end-to-end encryption. When it was finished I turned it on for my own journal. It was a slightly strange feeling. I now have something I built and can't open without my own passphrase. If I lose it, it stays closed. I think that's what a lock should be.

Practical note: when it's on, your writing is encrypted in your own browser with a key made from your passphrase, and the server only keeps scrambled text it can't read. You also get a recovery key to print, which is the only backup. It's optional. A simple private journal is fine for many people.

Not really about the lock

For a while I wanted the front page to talk about encryption. Then I noticed that when I open a journal, it's never because of security. It's because something wants to be said and there's no other place for it.

Security turned out to be just a feature to make it secure. So the front page now begins with: "Some things fit nowhere. They go here." The lock is still there, quietly.

The front door

At the start, two-factor login was required. It seemed right for something so private. Then I used it myself, every day, and it felt like a wall standing between me and one sentence I wanted to write.

Probably most people want to try the app first, not try to be secure. So now it's a gentle reminder every few logins, and there's a "don't remind me again" button that really means it.

Practical note: the smoothest way in is a passkey, which is Face ID or your fingerprint instead of a password. It takes a couple of seconds, and it happens to be the safer option too.

No streaks

Many journal apps keep a streak or send a reminder every day. I've noticed that when I miss a day, a streak doesn't bring me back. It makes me quietly stop.

My writing comes when something needs writing. Some months that's often, some months not at all. So there are no streaks, no reminders, no emails asking where I've been. If someone writes four times a year, those four are still there, waiting.

Answering an old entry

This was the part I wanted most. Once in a while an old entry comes back, from a year ago or three years ago, and asks: "you wrote this, anything to say to yourself now?"

Reading old worries is a little odd. Some of them never happened. Some are still here. The reply stays under the old entry, and over time one memory turns into a conversation between versions of the same person.

More than one of me

When I think, it rarely feels like one voice. There's usually a few of them, and they don't always agree. We talk to ourselves, we social with ourselves. That's where the name came from: Solous, solo and us. A kind of social media where everyone in the feed is you.

So each line can belong to whoever inside is saying it:

There's Joy, Fear, Doubt, Calm, and you can add your own, with or without an emoji.

Practical note: the speaker is saved as plain text at the start of the line, like @😊 Joy:. So it's encrypted along with the writing, it's in the export, and it should still make sense in a plain text file decades from now.

Will it last?

A journal is supposed to last a long time. A small app might not. That bothered me as a user, so I wanted to be sure the writing can always leave.

Practical note: one click exports everything as a zip of plain files: entries, replies, edit history and photos. It can be restored into Solous again, and an encrypted export can still be opened offline with the recovery key. If the service ever closes, the terms promise at least 90 days' notice.

Showing one thing

For months the whole point was that nothing is read. Then, now and then, I found an entry I wouldn't mind someone seeing. Not the whole journal. Just one.

So this week I added a way to publish a single entry with a link, while everything else stays private. There are no likes, no followers, and no view counts. The point of publishing isn't the dopamine, it's just letting someone see it.

This is the first one.

Who it's for

I built it with an AI, in the hours around a full-time job, and it costs very little to run, so it's free and has no ads. Nobody has to pay for it with their attention.

I use it, and it does what I hoped. I just have a feeling there are others who might find it useful, the ones who have more inside than they usually say.

If that sounds familiar, it's here: https://solous.net