What's new in Onsen 2.13: your journal can now be shared
Share a moment, watch it become part of someone else's story, and keep the pen the whole time.
Until now, an Onsen entry had exactly one reader: you. 2.13 changes that. Your journal can now be shared, one entry at a time, on your terms, always with a way back.
Send a moment to one person, or open it to anyone with a link. And if you allow it, the person you share with can add your entry to their own journal, where Onsen rewrites it from their side of the story, with your words quoted inside.
It is the feature we have been dreaming about since Onsen began, and it works nothing like posting to a feed. Here is what it actually does.
Share a moment from your journal
Open any entry and tap share. You get two ways for a moment to travel, and they are deliberately different.
A personal invite goes to one person, by email. The link is tied to their address, so a forwarded link shows nothing to anyone else. You choose what they can do with it: add the entry to their own journal, or just read it.
A public link opens as a beautiful web page anyone can view. Use it for the entry you would happily show the group chat, or your mom, or the internet. Nobody can add a public entry to their journal. It is a window, not a door.
Either way, what travels is a snapshot: the entry exactly as it is right now, artwork and all. Anything you write in your journal afterwards stays yours alone.
| Personal invite | Public link | |
|---|---|---|
| Who can open it | One person, signed in with the invited email | Anyone with the link |
| What they can do | Read it, or add it to their journal, your choice | Read it |
| Where it opens | Right in their Onsen app | A web page, no account needed |
| When it ends | The moment you stop sharing | The moment you turn it off |
It becomes part of their story
This is the part we love most, and the part that took the longest to get right.
When someone shares an entry with you and allows adding, tapping Add to My Journal does not paste their words into your journal as if you wrote them. Onsen writes your copy from your side of the story: an entry about receiving this moment, with their original words quoted inside. It keeps the shared artwork, gets its own insights, and from then on your AI companion remembers it, the way it remembers anything else in your journal. It also keeps its place in time: your copy shows both when the entry was written and when you added it, and Onsen remembers the moment by the day it was lived, not the day it arrived.
There is a reason this feels so good. Psychologists call it capitalization: sharing a good moment amplifies the good feeling beyond the event itself, and a warm reception deepens the relationship on both sides[1]. The entry you share is the moment. The entry they add is the warm reception, made permanent.
Your words stay quoted and untouchable inside their copy. The text and artwork of an added entry cannot be edited or regenerated. What someone chose to hand you stays what they handed you.
Yours to take back, always
Sharing something from your inner life should never feel like losing custody of it. So every part of sharing has a way back.
The new Shared Entries screen in Settings makes the review effortless. Two tabs, one for each direction: everything you have shared, and everything shared with you. A banner counts your live public links and takes you straight to them. And if you added someone's entry and think better of it, you can remove it from your journal right there, and add it back while the share is still active.
Your journal itself learned the same language. The filter now shows all entries, just your own, just the ones shared with you, or just the ones you have shared out. Shared entries also wear a small pill that tells the direction at a glance. Blue with a name means it came to you. Green with a count means you sent it out into the world.
A sharper companion under the hood
Onsen now runs on GPT-5.6, the newest generation of its AI. Conversations, journal insights, and guided experiences feel quicker and more thoughtful, and your companion is better at holding onto the details that matter to you. We grade thousands of conversations every week on warmth, focus, and honesty, the same way we did when we moved to GPT-5.4, and 5.6 cleared a higher bar than any model we have shipped.
One more thing landed alongside it. When a conversation reaches a natural close, Onsen now offers to carry it into your journal, so a good conversation becomes an entry without breaking the moment. If journaling still feels like a blank-page problem, our guide to starting a journal pairs well with this.
Smaller improvements
A few things you will notice, including some that landed quietly since our last post:
| Change | What you'll notice |
|---|---|
| Cleaner entry titles | The emoji beside every title is gone. Your artwork carries the mood; the title carries the words. |
| Smoother guided experiences | Conversations stay responsive while your guide is writing, with gentle slides between steps and a snappier feel throughout. |
| Privacy policy, updated | Sharing needed new promises, so our privacy policy covers it in plain English. You'll be asked to acknowledge it on your next sign-in. |
The fastest way to feel this release is to open the entry you wish someone else could read, tap share, and send it to the person it makes you think of. Then watch what comes back. Sometimes the reply is a text message. Sometimes it is the quiet knowledge that your moment is sitting in their journal now, written in their voice, with your words safe inside it.
Download Onsen for free if you haven't yet. It is the same warm AI companion (chat, guided experiences, mood check-ins, Pulses, journal, voice), and now the journal has a door in it, with the key on your side.
Some moments are too good to keep to yourself. Now you don't have to.
Sources
- 1.Gable, Reis, Impett & Asher (2004). “What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events.” [PubMed ]
