A self-hosted, private newsletter for a small circle of friends or family.
Each round, everyone answers a few questions in private — text, photos, links, audio, video. When the round closes, the answers are woven into a magazine-style issue for the whole circle to read and comment on. Then the next round opens by itself.
No feeds, no likes, no public anything: your people, one URL, one SQLite file.
- Questions go out — your default prompts, picks from a question bank, and suggestions members sent in while reading the last issue.
- Everyone answers in private. Autosaving drafts; photos and videos from the camera roll, link embeds, audio and video recorded straight from the browser; and a free-form photo & video dump — caption anything you drop in — for everything that didn't fit a question. Reminder emails chase the stragglers so you don't have to.
- The issue is published — at the deadline automatically, or when the admin presses the button. Everyone gets an email that signs them straight into the reading view. The dump becomes the closing collage.
- The next round opens on schedule. On a monthly cadence the whole thing runs itself.
Answering happens in a calm, autosaving editor, and running a round is a single page for the admin — progress, one-click nudges, live question editing, deadline extension, publish-now. Nothing gets lost afterwards: every photo, video, and audio clip ever shared stays browsable under Media, grouped by issue.
Between rounds there's Ramble — one private page per day for whatever crossed your mind, in words, photos, video, or voice notes. Nobody sees a word of it unless, when a round opens, you weave those days into the issue: you get an editable copy to trim first (the journal itself never changes), and it's published as a "From the notebooks" spread where every day carries its own comment thread.
It reads just as well on a phone, login is passwordless (email magic links), everything exports as JSON or a full ZIP — and one instance can host several circles, each with its own members, rounds, and settings, one login per person across all of them (how that works).
Development mode needs no mail account and no secrets — outgoing email is
captured in the logs, and /dev/login gives you instant sessions:
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --buildOpen http://localhost:8090/dev/login?email=admin@example.com and the setup wizard takes it from there. Templates and static assets hot-reload from your working tree.
cp .env.example .env # fill it in — every value is explained in the file
docker compose up -d --buildOr skip the build and use the prebuilt image with
docker compose -f docker-compose.deploy.yml up -d. Either way the
compose file refuses to start until BASE_URL, FROM_EMAIL,
ADMIN_EMAIL, and SESSION_SECRET are set — there are deliberately no
production defaults for those. Put any TLS-terminating reverse proxy in
front, and you're live.
The full walkthrough — environment reference, email delivery, the setup wizard, your first round — is in docs/getting-started.md.
| Guide | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Deploy → wizard → first published issue, plus the configuration reference |
| Fastmail / JMAP email | Send through a Fastmail API token instead of SMTP |
| Upgrading | Automatic migrations and backups, rehearsal, rollback |
| Multi-circle design | How several circles share one instance |
go test ./... # unit + integration tests (no network)
cd tests && npm install && npm run snap # Playwright screenshot crawl of every pageGo + SQLite + server-rendered templates, one binary. The UI is a
hand-rolled design system ("Pallu", saree-textile inspired) in
static/pallu.css. Migrations are embedded and apply themselves on boot —
after snapshotting the database first.