journal_light1200×861 42.9 KB

Introducing Journal: Your Private Space for Reflection

We’re using req_llm under the hood for the AI-related features.

Background

Something that I’m often confronted with is the all-encompassing "network effects” effect . So, I have been thinking for a while on how people can get value out of MOSSLET without having to rely on the social network aspect.

And as a writer per-say… I’ve always been interested in journals but doubted the privacy of anything digital (not to mention the whole pen and paper thing).

So I think there’s always been a part of me that has wanted to make a version of a digital journal that I would want to use, and now I have:

Features

• Write freely: Create entries with optional titles, track your mood from 30 different options (joyful, anxious, nostalgic, creative — whatever fits), and watch your word count grow as you reflect.
• Organize with Books: Group related entries into books — maybe one for travel memories, another for gratitude practice, a third for working through something difficult. Each book gets its own cover color (or upload a photo) and description.
• Track your progress: See your total entries, word count, and current writing streak right on your dashboard. Small wins matter.
• Star your favorites: Mark entries that mean something special so you can find them again easily.
• Privacy screen: Quickly hide the content of your journals if someone enters the room, with a visual countdown until your password will be required to reveal them again.
• Auto-save: Your writing saves automatically as you go. No more losing thoughts to a browser crash or forgotten save button.

AI Features

• Journaling prompts: Stuck on what to write? Tap “Inspire me” and get a thoughtful, personalized prompt tailored to your current mood. Great for days when you want to write but don’t know where to start.
• Mood insights: After you’ve written a few entries, we’ll generate a gentle, supportive summary of patterns we notice in your journaling — like “You’ve been writing more on weekends and seem most creative after morning entries.” It’s like having a thoughtful friend reflect back what they’ve noticed.
• Handwritten journal upload: Prefer writing by hand? Take a photo of your handwritten pages and we’ll digitize them for you. The AI reads your handwriting, even detects dates, and converts it into a searchable, encrypted entry.

Privacy-first AI

• Prompts are generated without your content: When you ask for a journaling prompt, we only send your current mood (if you’ve set one) — not your entries, not your history, nothing personal. The AI generates a prompt based on that single piece of context.
• Mood insights use minimal data: We send only dates, moods, and word counts to generate insights — never the actual content of what you’ve written. The pattern “March 15: happy, 450 words” tells the AI enough to notice trends without revealing what you actually said.
• Handwriting processing is immediate: When you upload a photo of your handwriting, it’s processed once to extract the text, then immediately deleted. The extracted text is encrypted with your personal key before it ever touches our database. The original image? Gone.
• No training on your data: We don’t use your journal entries, prompts, or insights to train AI models. Ever. Your reflections are not our oil.

A space for you

My vision for MOSSLET was always more about protecting and preserving people’s wellbeing online than anything else. And a big part of that was protecting people’s privacy, as our privacy serves as an entryway to our humanity.

And I saw how everyone was using social platforms (including this one) that were constantly and egregiously violating their privacy and taking the invisible bits that make up our humanity and commoditizing it—ultimately repurposing it until it’s gone.

So I chose to make a privacy-first social network in order for myself and others to have a space to simply exist online. But what if you can’t get out of the trap of these platforms? What if your friends can’t? I’ve learned this is related to something often called a “cold start”.

And it does feel cold, it feels lonely too.

So it made sense to me to bring some warmth to MOSSLET by applying our privacy-first design to a journaling feature. Journaling is a private process that preserves and protects, even enhances, our wellbeing. It does all of this because of the privacy of it. So, it is a natural fit for us.

And here we are, an exciting new privacy-first Journal on MOSSLET.

Thank you for following along

If you’ve been following along, thank you. It’s been quite a journey to get here and feels like still just getting started. I’m working on native apps right now and will be so excited when that’s ready to announce (been a long time coming).

“true" in reference to us. Our asymmetric encryption architecture for Posts relies on trusting our servers, which you can, but now our Conversations (DMs/messages) utilizes our same asymmetric encryption (with symmetric encryption on top for post quantum resistance at rest) in the browser to be zero knowledge for our servers

Following up from the Conversations note back in March — we just finished migrating the majority of Mosslet to be zero-knowledge post-quantum encrypted like Metamorphic (except Mosslet uses Cat-5).

Posts, replies, groups, journals, profile fields, registration — all of it is now zero-knowledge browser-side, with hybrid ML-KEM-1024 + X25519 sealing. Four phases, four audits, ~230 server-side decrypt sites reviewed. I wrote the whole story up on dev.to including the honest edges (~102 server-side decrypts that remain, what they are, and why):

Building the World’s First Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Social Network: A Phased Migration Story

AFAIK it’s the world’s first running in production with customers so I have been running with that headline for now . Happy to answer Elixir/Phoenix-specific questions here if anyone’s curious about anything