Slack + deariary: capture the conversations that matter

#integration #guide

Last night a friend sent something funny in your group’s Slack channel. You laughed, someone piled on with a reaction, and the conversation drifted into weekend plans. This morning you cannot remember exactly what they said. By next week, the thread will be buried. By next month, it never happened.

Slack is great for talking right now. It is terrible at remembering. And the conversations that matter to your diary are not the ones you would think to save. They are the offhand jokes, the late-night recommendations, the check-ins with a friend who lives in another timezone. The stuff that makes an ordinary day feel like yours.

deariary captures those conversations and weaves them into your diary entry alongside everything else that happened that day.

Your personal Slack, not your company’s

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: most people cannot connect their company’s Slack to a personal diary app. IT controls the workspace, third-party app installs require admin approval, and even if you could, mixing work data with a personal diary is messy.

This integration is not really about work Slack. It is about the Slack workspaces that belong to you:

A personal workspace where you keep a journal channel, logging what you are doing, thinking, and feeling throughout the day. It is one of the best sources for a diary because you are already writing about your day in real time.
A friend group workspace. You and your friends share links, plan trips, argue about games, and send memes. These conversations are some of the most diary-worthy moments of your day, and they are the first to disappear.
A community or hobby workspace. The open source project you contribute to, the book club, the gaming guild, the indie dev community. Your participation in these spaces is part of your life, and it goes unrecorded.
A workspace where you talk to an AI agent. Tools like OpenClaw let you run a personal AI assistant inside Slack. You ask it questions, brainstorm ideas, get help with decisions. Those conversations are some of the most interesting parts of your day, and they vanish as fast as any other Slack thread.

If you have ever scrolled back through a Slack workspace and thought “I wish I remembered more of this,” that is the feeling deariary is for.

What disappears from personal Slack

Work Slack has the excuse of volume. Personal Slack is different: the volume is lower, but the signal-to-noise ratio is higher. Almost everything in your friend group’s Slack matters to you. And almost all of it vanishes anyway.

Here is what typically fades:

The casual conversation that turned meaningful. Someone asked what everyone is playing, and the thread turned into a real talk about burnout. Nobody bookmarks that.
The recommendation you forgot. A friend shared a movie, a restaurant, a song. You meant to check it out. The message scrolled away.
Inside jokes and running bits. The context of why something was funny dissolves in days. The joke only works if you remember the setup.
Planning conversations. “Let’s go camping in May.” “Who’s coming to the meetup?” These threads contain the excitement and anticipation that a calendar invite cannot capture.

Slack’s free plan makes this worse: only the most recent 90 days of messages are searchable. Even if you wanted to look back, the history may already be gone.

A self-journaling channel: your diary is half-written already

Some people create a personal channel in Slack, something like #journal or #yourname-log, and post short updates about what they are doing, thinking, or working through during the day. It is like a microblog that only your workspace can see.

If you do this, you are already doing the hard part of journaling: recording your day as it happens. The problem is that these posts live scattered across the day, mixed with reactions and threads, and nobody re-reads their own log channel a month later.

deariary changes that equation. Connect the workspace, select your journal channel, and your scattered posts become a coherent diary entry. The things you noted at 10am, the frustration you vented at 3pm, the small win you celebrated at 6pm, all of it flows into a single narrative for the day.

If you already keep a channel like this, deariary is the easiest way to turn that existing habit into a real diary with zero extra effort.

Your AI conversations, in your diary

Here is a use case we did not plan for but turned out to be one of the most interesting: people who chat with an AI agent in Slack.

Services like OpenClaw let you add a personal AI assistant to your Slack workspace. You can ask it to help you think through a decision, brainstorm a project name, explain a concept, or just have a casual conversation. The AI lives in a Slack channel, so the conversation looks like any other thread.

The problem is the same as every Slack conversation: it scrolls away. You had a great brainstorm with your AI assistant about a side project idea on Tuesday. By Friday you cannot remember the details. ChatGPT and Claude have their own chat histories, but those are locked inside each app. If you use an AI agent through Slack, the conversation lives in Slack, and that means deariary can capture it.

Select the channel where your AI agent lives, and those conversations become part of your diary. The entry might mention that you spent an hour brainstorming app names, or that you asked your assistant to help you compare two approaches to a problem. Mixed in with the rest of your day (the friend group chat, the journal channel, the community thread) it paints a fuller picture of how you actually spent your time.

This works especially well because AI conversations are hard to remember. You have them casually, almost like thinking out loud, and the details fade within days. But reading them back in a diary entry weeks later, you often find that the conversation was more useful than you realized. “Oh right, that is where I decided to switch frameworks.” “I forgot I had already worked through this problem.”

What deariary collects from Slack

When you connect Slack, deariary pulls your daily activity from the channels you choose through the Slack API. Here is what it captures:

Channel messages: messages in the public and private channels you have selected
Thread replies: full threaded discussions, including replies from friends and community members
Reactions: emoji reactions on messages (the emoji and count, not who reacted)
User names: display names of people in the conversations, so the diary can refer to friends by name

You choose which channels deariary can access during setup, and you can change your selection at any time. deariary does not read DMs or group DMs.

What deariary does NOT collect

No DMs or group DMs. deariary only reads channels (public and private) that you explicitly select. Direct messages are completely off limits.
No system messages. Join/leave notifications and other automated system messages are filtered out.
No file contents. Files shared in Slack (images, documents, links with previews) are not accessed or stored.
No channels you have not selected. You pick which channels deariary can see. It does not scan your entire workspace.

You can review and revoke the connection at any time from your Slack app settings.

From scattered messages to a readable day

Say you had a day where you posted a few updates in your #journal channel, jumped into a thread in your friend group’s #random about weekend plans, and had a long conversation in an indie dev community about a tool someone recommended. On Slack, that is three separate channels you would need to scroll through to piece together what your social day looked like.

deariary combines them into one entry. It might read:

You spent the morning working through a tricky CSS layout issue, posting your progress in your journal channel. In the afternoon, the friend group started planning a camping trip for Golden Week, and you volunteered to handle the campsite reservation. Later you got into a thread in the dev community about a new database tool, where you shared your experience with SQLite and got some good tips about migration strategies.

One entry. The full picture. No scrolling through three channels to reconstruct a day you have already half-forgotten.

The conversations you forget fastest

The big events stick. You remember the day your friend group decided to take a trip, because the trip itself anchors the memory.

What you forget are the ordinary exchanges: the friend who shared a song and said “this reminded me of you.” The thread where everyone was recommending comfort food. The late-night conversation where someone was having a rough week and you stayed up to listen. These small moments of connection are the emotional texture of your day. They are also the first to vanish from memory.

deariary captures them because it sees your full day of Slack activity across all your selected channels, not just the moments you would have thought to screenshot. When you re-read your diary three months later, it is often these small details that hit the hardest. “I forgot we talked about that.” “I forgot they said that to me.”

That is what a diary is for.

Slack alone vs. Slack with other integrations

A Slack-only diary gives you a window into your conversations. That is valuable on its own, especially if you keep a personal journal channel. But it is one dimension of your day.

Combine Slack with other integrations and the diary fills out:

Slack only:

You posted a few updates in your journal channel about the blog redesign. In the evening, the friend group discussed where to eat this weekend. Someone recommended a Thai place and everyone seemed into it.

Slack + Google Calendar + Steam:

You had a quiet morning, with a dentist appointment at 10am. After lunch you worked on the blog redesign, posting progress updates in your journal channel as you went. The friend group debated dinner plans for Saturday and landed on a Thai restaurant downtown. In the evening you played two rounds of a new co-op game with a friend, and you are both already planning a rematch.

The second entry describes a day in a life. The first describes a chat log.

On the Free plan you can connect one integration, which is enough to try Slack on its own. Upgrading to Basic (up to 5 integrations) lets you combine Slack with the rest of your day. See pricing on deariary.com for details.

When Slack activity is low

Some days you barely open Slack. Maybe you were out, maybe you were in deep focus, maybe it was just a quiet day.

On those days, deariary has less Slack data to work with. If you have other integrations connected, they fill in the picture. A quiet Slack day might still produce a rich diary entry if your calendar was full or your gaming session was long.

If Slack is your only integration, the entry will be short. deariary does not fabricate conversations or inflate a quiet day. Honesty is the point.

Setting it up

Connecting Slack to deariary takes about a minute:

Go to app.deariary.com
Open Settings and find the Integrations section
Click Slack and authorize with your Slack workspace
Choose which channels deariary can access (you can update this later)

That is it. The next morning, your diary will include your Slack conversations from the previous day. No bots to configure, no slash commands, no workflow builders.

If you have multiple workspaces (say, a personal one and a friend group), you can connect each one separately.

What surprised us

We have been running deariary with Slack connected since the early prototype. A few things caught us off guard.

Self-journaling channels are the best diary source we have seen. People who already keep a personal log channel produce incredibly rich diary entries with no additional effort. They are already narrating their day. deariary just turns it into something you will actually re-read.

Friend group conversations carry more emotion than you expect. We thought the diary entries from friend Slack groups would read like chat logs. They do not. The LLM picks up on the tone, the jokes, the energy of a conversation. An entry that mentions your friend group planning a trip reads differently from a calendar event that says “camping.” The excitement is in the messages.

The small reactions matter. A heart emoji on your message does not register as an event in your memory. But when the diary notes that your friends reacted warmly to something you shared, it adds a quiet detail that makes the entry feel alive. Months later, that detail is the one that surprises you.

Slack is built for conversations that happen right now. deariary turns those conversations into a record that is still meaningful months from now. If your day includes a personal journal channel, a friend group workspace, or a community you care about, this integration captures the parts that matter before they scroll away.

Connect Slack to deariary