An Online Diary
what we actually miss about them
The internet used to be full of online diaries. Open Diary, LiveJournal, Xanga — plain pages where ordinary people wrote down ordinary days, and it was somehow the warmest corner of the web. If you kept one, you know the feeling this page is about. If you’re just now looking for one, the honest part first: Little Memory is an iPhone app, not a diary you keep in a browser tab. There’s a whole honest page on that.
But what most of us miss about the online diaries wasn’t the browser. It was having a place: somewhere the days went, somewhere that kept them, somewhere that wasn’t a notebook destined for a box. That part survives, and it got more private on the way.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
The diary that meets you where you type
Little Memory sends a gentle email each evening. Hit reply, write a line about today, and send — the entry is saved with everything else, no app open. You can also write the day’s line in a browser from whatever machine you’re at, and it’s waiting in the app after. Journaling by email has been part of Little Memory since 2011, an idea beloved since the OhLife days.
Online without the audience
The old online diaries came with readers, and the readers came with a small performance — even three friends on a friends list changes what you’ll admit about your day. Little Memory has no feed, no followers, and no social login. It’s the diary with the door closed, which turns out to be where the honest sentences live.
What “online” was really promising was safekeeping, and that part is all here: automated nightly backups, search across every year, and a full export whenever you like.
The archive grows up
The quiet reward of any long-running diary is reading it back. Little Memory does that for you — each time you open it, there’s your line from a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago. People have been at it here since 2011: over 1,000,000 entries from over 30,000 diarists, featured by Apple three times.
The little tour shows how it all fits together, and if you’re comparing apps, the comparison pages are honest about the others too.
