Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally

> That is possible in theory, but for me personally that's just too detailed. :D I wouldn't need all that granularity, myself.

Think this can go quite far with just the browsing history & content of viewed webpages.

I do see that. I think for that reason it would be cool to support a kind of extension system for arbitrary "collectors". And then solid filtering to filter data.

The vision is definitely similar. I am very pleasantly surprised to see your project. And I also like your ideas/roadmap on the website. I know you are building this for yourself/your family but I certainly would be open to contribute to it.

I mostly felt like Timelize was about being *behind* data-generating applications and showing and cross-referencing their data when reading the website.

I think the way is to do some sort of nextcloud extension that puts data into Timeline.

I also saw it tracks "documents" on the website but I didn't try it yet, and I would hope it can use external document sources that are already processing documents like paperless for example (which I am already using and liking)

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

https://www.scribd.com/document/18361503/Eric-T-Freeman-The-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface#:~:text=N...

It's interesting to read such a comment here. I see comments from people on this site frequently who work for Google, Facebook, OpenAI and other such companies where everyday software that doesn't respect users or their privacy is being worked on.

However, if I suggest doing similar data collection and analysis that they already do but in a way that is self hostable/governable and respects my privacy and threat model, it is bad?

I'm at least proposing that this be open source, self hostable and valuable to yourself.

Also, I know my threat model. Maybe you are James Bond though.

Anything in ~/Inbox is "safe to delete" because it's guaranteed to have an off-site backup.

Presumably a fancy management app would queue (or symlink) the full directory structure into ~/Inbox (which would then behave as a "streaming cache")

~/Inbox would effectively be available (read only) on "all machines" and "for free" with near zero disk space until you start accessing or pulling down files.

I use Dropbox to manage ~/Sync (aka: active, not "dead" files).

"Outbox", "Inbox", and "Sync" have been the "collaboration names" that resonated the most with me (along with ~/Public if you're old enough, and ~/Documents for stuff that's currently purely local)

> I just don't think any other way of doing it is really feasible to truly preserve your privacy. I am likely wrong, but if so, I also imagine it's very tedious, nuanced, error-prone, and restrictive.

It's certainly not easy but I wouldn't go as far as saying it requires homomorphic encryption. Have you had a look at what the Ente.io people do? Even though everything is E2E-encrypted, they have (purely local) facial recognition, which to me sounds an order of magnitude harder (compute-intensive) than building a chronological index/timeline. But maybe I'm missing something here, which isn't unlikely, given that I'm not the person who just spent a decade building this very cool tool.

> It acts as a backup, and it ensures consistency, reliability, and availability.

Hmmm, according to you[0],

> Timelinize is an archival tool, not a backup utility. Please back up your timeline(s) with a proper backup tool.

;)

I get your point, though, especially when it comes to reliability & availability. Maybe the deduplication needs to happen at a different level, e.g. at the level of the file system (ZFS etc.) or at least at the level of backups (i.e. have restic/borgbackup deduplicate identical files in the backed-up data).

Then again, I can't say I have not had wet dreams once or twice of a future where apps & their persistent data simply refer to user files through their content hashes, instead of hard-coding paths & URLs. (Prime example: Why don't m3u playlist files use hashes to become resistant against file renamings? Every music player already indexes all music files, anyway. Sigh.)

> Especially since it's not just obvious what changes, it's encryption so it's kind of a black box.

Wouldn't you rather diff the data after decrypting the archive?

> Just to reiterate, one of the main goals of Timelinize is to have your data. It may mean some duplication, but I'm OK with that. Storage is getting cheap enough, and even if it's expensive, it's worth it.

I suspect it will lead to duplication of pretty much all user data (i.e. original storage requirements × 2), at least if you're serious about your timeline. However, I see your point, it might very well be a tradeoff that's worth it.

[0]: https://timelinize.com/docs/importing-data

With 2D time you can ask complex questions about what you knew when, with simpler questions automatically extended into a question about the current time. Like:

    "What is the price?" -> "What is the price today, as of today?"
    "What was the price in 2022" -> "What was the price in 2022, as of today?"
    "What was the price in 2022, as of 2023?"

Docs: https://docs.xtdb.com/concepts/key-concepts.html#temporal-co... | 2025 Blog: https://xtdb.com/blog/diy-bitemporality-challenge | Visualization tool: https://docs.xtdb.com/concepts/key-concepts.html#temporal-co...

One interesting scenario re time traveling is if we use an LLM somewhere in data derivation. Say there's a secondary processor of e.g. journal notes that yield one kind of feature extraction, but the model gets updated at some point, then the output possibilities expand very quickly. We might also allow human intervention/correction, which should take priority and resist overwrites. Assuming we're caching these data then they'll also land somewhere in the database and unless provenance is first class, they'll appear just as ground truth as any other.

Bitemporal databases look interesting but the amount of scaffolding above sqlite makes the data harder to manage.

So if I keep ground truth data as text, looks like I'm going to have an import pipeline into timelinize, and basically ensure that there's a stable pkey (almost certainly timestamp + qualifier), and always overwrite. Seems feasible, pretty exciting!

> You might suggest to users the following use case. “If you want to create a Timelinize data store, but don’t feel that your own local systems are secure enough to safely hold a basket with a copy of every egg in your life, you might consider the following use case, which some of our customers implement. Once our twice a year, update the data store, but store it on an external disk. When the update is done, take the disk offline and keep it in a drawer or safe.”

Sure, I like that.

> I always wondered how cool it would be if I could tell some Spotify-like system, “I’m 20 miles away from the lake, we are going to stay in the cabins a week, just like we did 10 years ago. Play me the exact same songs now that played at every turn back then.”

It's inevitable for an LLM and other tooling like personal assistants to be integrated to this thing, so yeah that sounds like a great use case.

> For a name, how about: ChronEngine That name seems pretty free and clear from previous use, if you like it grab ChronEngine.com before some squatter does and thank me with a phone call, I would enjoy a quick chat with you. ... Oh and make a list of anybody that says they have done an elaborate something similar with Excel (like me and at least one other person in this thread) and maybe have a discussion with them some time, we/they might have some useful insights.

Not bad actually; and sure, we can chat either way. Feel free to book a time at https://matt.chat.

> Your web page might benefit from a grid that lists all the input sources you accept, with hotlinks next to the names that give a pop-up quick summary of what that source is about, and maybe some color coding that shows something like “green = rock solid lately”, “yellow = some users reporting problems”, “red = they just updated their format, it’s broken, we are working on it”. You will/are facing challenges similar to Trillian, a chat client from the early 2000s that would try to maintain ongoing connection compatibility with multiple other chat clients such as AIM/ICQ/MSN. Also, the grid could have a “suggested source sets” filter that helped people find what 5 (for example) input sources they might select for their use style.

I LOVED Trillian, thanks or the nostalgia. Oh man, they're still alive: https://trillian.im/ (I love the icon...)

Being able to share a time-based, geo-based, or X-based slice (all or some of) with someone would be a great way to learn about "close encounters" before or after we met, or even someone else's perspective of a shared trip or experience.

Just a general comment; you've made something truly wonderful (IMHO), and I look forward to seeing where you take this.

Bookmarks, contacts, notes for example, they are usually not time-based but by context, category or whichever organization their usage demands at the moment. They can be time-based in a journal, but usually I do not remember websites or people by the time I encountered them, so I would not search them this way.

The other question is how personal is personal in this project? Are my IMDB-ratings valid data for this? My Ebook-collection? My Steam-account? Those are usually things I would not manage in a timeline or a map, but with different interfaces and features.