In this video I’m checking out Journiv, a private, self-hosted journaling app that the developer reached out to show me. And honestly, the timing was kind of perfect—over the past few weeks I’ve been dealing with some anxiety I can’t really place, and one of the big things you’ll hear from therapists and medical professionals is: write things down. The problem is getting started. That’s why I really like Journiv’s daily prompts—they give you something to react to so you’re not just staring at a blank page. I walk through my own instance (it’s been up about five days, and I’ve only written twice—so yeah, I’m not here pretending I’m a journaling guru). We look at streaks, entries, adding images/tags, multiple journals, and the Insights page with word counts and mood trends. I also point out it’s still beta, and there are a couple things I’d love to see—like setting a default journal—and I’m genuinely curious where the prompts are coming from. Then I jump into the GitHub and talk deployment. There’s a “simple” SQLite Docker setup and a more complex compose that can use Postgres and Docker profiles. I ran into a few hiccups (some of that was me learning profiles), so I show the straightforward approach: tweak the port (8000 conflicts with Portainer), generate a solid secret key, use a Docker volume, deploy, create an account, and start journaling.