Id set up a static website with Hugo. You can preview and build locally. Or put it on your home network and vpn in if you need remote access to make an entry.

In your content folder you could do content/[year]/[month]/[day]/index.md, and have a _index.md in the year and in month folders so there would be pages with automatic collection of articles under that year/ month. You could also subdivide the content folder into health/ general/ shower thoughts and other "types" of journals

They have support for tags, categories, and custom taxonomies. So if you wanted to have "people" category you could, and then a "thing" category or any other sort of way to tag the content.

https://gohugo.io/

Zim desktop wiki? I've used it for years. Cross platform, open source, lots of features. Bear in mind that there are a lot of plugins, including one specifically for journaling

I don't think it will have everything you're looking for, but I really like DailyTxT. I do have a couple other note-taking apps & seeing if I want to replace DailyTxT with Obsidian, but I like the web-hosted & straight-forwardness of DailyTxT.

Yeah, I think you're looking for Monica at this point.

https://www.usememos.com/ Would be great for this.

Trillium is a full featured configurable and programmable self-hosted note-taking app that can be easily configured to suit the use case you're describing, it does categories, tags, links to other topics etc.

@Shimitar@feddit.it I would use obsidian, but for really self hosted I would try silverbullet