[dvcrn]

Day One is such a big part of my life that this acquisition makes me very worried about its future. It's been gradually getting more aggressive with pushing people into subscriptions, and while I'm still on the grandfathered plan that can use sync without subscription, it makes me worried that I might have to migrate my entire 4-5 years of journal data to something else soon...

[implying]

Ultimately, if the data isn't on your hardware, parsable by open source software, there's always a chance a corporate move could imperil it.

[dvcrn]

Luckily day one is fully e2ee encrypted, otherwise I wouldn’t trust their self baked sync service a bit

[fny]

You should actually be very happy. Given Automattic's track record, it might become free.

[disposekinetics]

I relied very heavily on Day One until they dropped most of their local-hosting features. It was painful and I still haven't found any comparable alternative.

[tunesmith]

Wow, I didn't realize they did that... I've had Day One suggested to me many time and always resisted, I guess I'm glad I did. I don't know what I want as an alternative, though - I guess what would be ideal is something that is Desktop/Mobile, syncs markdown to a shared filesystem like Dropbox, and has lots of optional bells and whistles for cataloguing and organization that I wouldn't mind losing since I'd still have the actual content in markdown.

[crossroadsguy]

I tried. There isn’t one. Dyrii was decent. But it was abandoned. There’s Journey (with their cluttered and poor interface) but they’ve not been able to pull themselves out of Google’s sink-hole. Even after you login with Apple Login they ask you to add a Google Drive account to sync data.

So I literally just moved back to pen and paper. Something I had been doing since school (school school). I haven’t missed any journaling app since. But having one would be nice.

[CA0DA]

How about Joplin? (https://joplinapp.org/)

[andix]

Great idea. Joplin is a really good note taking app, open source, free and you can easily sync it via webdav.

It's not a journaling app per se, but you could use it for that.

The mobile apps are not perfect yet though.

[loop22]

Still running an 8 year old version for that reason. Tried switching to MacJournal once it became free but kept going back.

[neillyons]

Same. I still use the old app on my iPhone. Syncing to Dropbox and iCloud no longer works. I periodically export to pdf as a backup. I have nine years of notes in that pdf.

At some point an iOS update is going fully break the app, but I'm still hanging on.

[makecheck]

While I generally do not like subscriptions, surely “sync” falls into the category of “well of course that is a subscription”?

Someone must maintain a server indefinitely for you to sync whenever you want. That is a continuous cost that also has a scale factor, e.g. based on number of users. Without revenue proportional to that cost (e.g. per user), how can it be expected to remain functional?

[dustyharddrive]

I think the distaste for Day One’s subscription stems from the fact that an update removed the ability to sync on the user’s platform of choice (iCloud or Dropbox) which they were already paying for, and forced them into the first-party service.

[apricot13]

that was my first thought too. I've messed about with their import / export features but found them a bit lacking. so either this means it goes wrong and I get a decent export option developed or it gets better and I stay there but also get a better export option for backups!