TreeHole starts simply: you talk about your day and how it felt, and you get an emotionally supportive response. Come back the next day, and that conversation has quietly become an entry in a private journal.
As those entries grow, TreeHole brings back the relevant ones when you need them so the you that already survived past hard nights can sit with you now. (Down the line, those same entries can optionally power a digital avatar for people you trust.)
I'd love to hear from you: have you ever gone back and reread an old journal or message and had it land completely differently? And which part would matter most to you the support in the moment, the record it leaves, or the memory it builds over time?
Hi everyone 👋
I'm Yunfei. I built TreeHole because I've lived with depression for nearly 20 years.
Medication and therapy helped with the symptoms, but the thing that actually reached me was never advice from outside — it was rereading my own old reflections. Hearing my past self, the one who'd already survived the same dark nights, speak to my present self felt more real than anything anyone else could tell me.
The problem is that almost no one (me included) can keep up a journaling habit. So TreeHole flips it around: you just talk about your day and how it felt — like messaging a friend. The AI quietly turns that into a thoughtful entry in a private life journal, and the next time you talk, it brings back the relevant past entries, so the version of you that already made it through can sit with you again.
On privacy: your entries are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), isolated per account, and you never have to give your real name. I'll be straight about the limit, too — to write your journal the app has to decrypt your text server-side, so technically I could read it. I say so plainly in the ToS, and taking even myself out of that trust boundary (TEE) is on the roadmap. For a privacy product I'd rather tell you exactly what it is than overclaim.
This is my honest attempt to build the tool I wish I'd had years ago. I'd love your thoughts, your feedback, or your own experiences — especially if you've struggled with something similar.
Thank you for checking it out ❤️
Love the concept of hearing a past version of yourself when you need it most. One thing that would really help: let users mark specific journal entries as off-limits for the avatar, so people can keep certain private moments truly private while still sharing the rest with loved ones.
@mitv67t Thanks for the suggestion. The avatar can read the journals, but it can not share the original journal to others. But it would be better to exclude the selected journals from being referenced.
One more thing — the part of TreeHole I've wanted to build for the longest time: the Digital Avatar.
After you've journaled for a while, those entries become a surprisingly honest record of who you are — how you think, what you love, how you got through your hardest nights. The avatar is built on that. When someone you've chosen talks to it, it answers in the first person, in your voice, grounded in what you actually wrote (through the same private, encrypted RAG that powers your own chats). If your diaries don't hold something, it says it doesn't quite remember, instead of making it up.
I built it thinking about my kids. There will be nights, years from now, when they're facing something heavy and I won't be there — and this is a way for them to still hear me say: "I know how this feels, because I felt it too. Here's how I got through."
A few things that mattered to me:
It's off by default. You decide exactly who can reach it — and you can change that list or switch it off anytime.
Your diaries stay encrypted at rest and isolated per account; the avatar only ever draws from what you actually wrote.
I try to be honest about what it is: not a replacement for you, more like a letter that can answer back.
I'd genuinely love your take — is this something you'd turn on? Who would you leave a voice for, and what would it take to trust it enough to do so?