I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread.
Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working.
Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of software made all the difference re keeping up with people. The e-mail notifications is a killer feature - so simple, yet I've never done it before in my personal inbox.
I think the fact that it's an external service and not inside your inbox matters from a UX perspective. I have this other place where I define the logic, and then receive it in the screen I look at every morning.
Originally came to know of the project years back through https://sive.rs/hundreds, and while he's a bit better (a lot better) at it than I am, I can confidently say I've stayed in touch with dozens of people thanks to Monica. His notion of "ranked lists" also makes sense, at least to me, as a mental framework for managing personal contacts.
Shameless plug (for the creators!): I 100% recommend Monica, have contributed to it, and am a big big supporter of https://github.com/djaiss (Regis), https://github.com/asbiin (Alexis), et al.
They're actively working on something new now, so if that helps them somehow - link incoming:
A personal comment: There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.
Example: Say I met someone years ago at school, and I thought she was pretty cool. I added her to Monica and I reach out to her once in a while to see what's up. We talk about work, exchange some personal stories, and go our separate ways. I might not think about her for months at a time, but then - quite intentionally - I think about her when the email notification comes up. It makes me happy that this person is somehow in my life.
Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.
If it works, right?
When you use Monica, do you add and change data directly in Monica (manually)? Or in some scripted/automated fashion?
I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations.
I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444
I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable.
Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school.
The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC.
If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.