Rekindly 0.2 is out. It brings three things that were on the list from the start, and a few fixes I found while preparing it. Before I get to them, I want to use the occasion to write down some thoughts about what Rekindly is actually for, because they decide what goes into it and what stays out.
Remembering is not the point
It is easy to describe Rekindly as a memory aid, and in a way it is one. But remembering things about people is not the goal in itself. The goal is attention. If someone told you two weeks ago that their mother was in hospital, the useful part is not that you can recall the fact. It is that you ask how she is doing at the start of the call, before anything else. The briefing exists for that moment. It is short on purpose: it is meant to be read in the half minute before the phone rings, not studied.
That is also why Rekindly has no score, no streak and no ranking of your "best" contacts. A contact rhythm is a reminder you set for yourself, not a quota. If a month passes and you have not called someone, the Today page mentions it, and that is all.
Notes about other people are a responsibility
Everything in Rekindly is about people who never agreed to be in a database. I take that seriously, and it explains a few choices that might look stubborn otherwise. Rekindly runs on your own server, it sends no telemetry, it only talks to services you have set up yourself, and the AI features stay off until you allow them for a particular space. For the notes themselves, a simple rule helps: write them in a way you would be comfortable with if the person read them one day.
What is new in 0.2
- Mail. Rekindly can send you a short summary every morning with what is due, the birthdays of the coming days and the people you have been meaning to call. It can also ask for a code by email when you sign in with a password, as a second factor. Setting it up shows how often mail fails for reasons outside the app: a hosting provider may block outgoing mail ports, or the firewall of a mail server may block a whole network range after failed logins from somewhere in it, which mailcow does by default. Rekindly now explains such errors in plain words, and the documentation has a section on finding the cause.
- Themes and layouts. Six themes for light and dark mode, from the calm newspaper look to a high-contrast theme with larger type, and five layouts for the person page. You can build your own theme in the app and share it as a small file. A tool you open every day should feel like yours, and people use Rekindly differently: some mostly for friends and family, others mostly for clients.
- A logo, finally, with icons for the browser tab and the home screen.
Fixed along the way
Before this release I tested the upgrade on a copy of a real database, not only on invented data. That test found a bug that had been there since 0.1: if a single photo file went missing on the server, the export still pointed to it, and the whole backup could no longer be restored. It is exactly the kind of bug you only notice on the day you need your backup. It is fixed in 0.2, and older backups with this problem can be restored as well.
Why Rekindly stays a tool for one person
The most frequent wish so far was to use one installation together, as a couple, a family or a small team. I thought about it for a while and decided against it. An installation that belongs to one person makes a promise everyone understands at once: nobody else will ever read these notes. With shared spaces, roles and permissions, that promise would turn into "nobody else, except …", and you would have to think about who might read along each time you write something down. People write differently when others could be reading, and the value of Rekindly lies in notes you can write as openly as in a notebook. There is a technical side as well: with one person per installation, a whole class of mistakes, where a permission check fails and someone sees notes that are not theirs, simply cannot happen.
If several people want to use Rekindly, each of them runs their own installation. It is a single small container, so two or three fit on the same server without trouble. Contacts can be passed on as vCard files, and birthdays as a calendar subscription.
As always: if you try Rekindly and something is missing or does not work, please tell me on GitHub. The installation guide gets you started, and the changelog lists everything that changed.