Congrats on liberating your memories and thoughts. I look forward to your feedback.

Can you clarify the export issue you are seeing or please report it on github? The export/import has been working well. I am guessing you might have tried it out with quickstart docker compose or Synology NAS guide from mariaus hosting which does not have complete docker compose i.e. it is missing celery-workers container which are needed to create import/export jobs and run them async. Couple of users tripped on this so I will be improving the error message to specifically say they need to run complete stack right not the error message is very cryptic low level detail which is hard for anyone to understand what went wrong.

That sounds like a fun project. I did initially do some research in VJOURNAL but found it rather limiting for all the stuff I want to build in Journiv. I wrote a blogpost about it earlier: https://www.journiv.com/blog/why-journiv-doesnt-use-caldav The application is cross platform so it work as PWA and you can use it as mobile devices as PWA without any issues. Many Journiv users are already doing so. Native mobile apps are ready and will be coming soon once the project becomes sustainable to cover the development cost and expenses around it: https://github.com/orgs/journiv/discussions/184#discussioncomment-15180557

Hello, Sorry for the late reply. I do not use lemmy that often and only saw this now when I came here to post about new release. You’re right to call that out. I made an oversimplified claim. Let me clarify, XML vs JSON performance is nuanced:

1. Parsing speed: JSON is generally faster to parse than XML because:

• Simpler syntax (no opening/closing tags, no attributes vs elements decisions)
• Less data structure overhead
• More direct mapping to native data structures in most languages

2. Payload size: XML is typically more verbose due to:

• Opening and closing tags
• Namespace declarations
• Attribute syntax
• This means larger network transfers

However:

• Well-optimized XML parsers can be very fast
• The difference matters more for high-volume APIs than occasional journal syncs
• For large text content (like journal entries), the actual content dwarfs the format overhead

Journiv is source-available but not “Free Software” under the FSF/OSI definition. I chose the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license intentionally to keep the code open for personal and educational use which allow hosting for non-commercial while preventing “commercial” redistribution or hosting for commercial gain without permission.

My motivation behind Journiv is to give a solution to self hosted people like me and other a journal first experience on par with any major cloud offering so that they don’t have to mold their usage to a notes app and be unsatisfied and frustrated like me. This license enables everyone in the self hosted community to use Journiv.

I did consider permissive and copyleft licenses (Apache, GPL, BSD, etc.), but sustainability is a major concern for this project. I have already spent hundreds of hours on this over last couple of months and there is so much more to build (take a look at the issues page of github repo). I want to keep development open and transparent while ensuring that commercial entities can’t simply repackage and profit from it.