Notesnook doesn't have self hosting yet (the developers are working on it) but it might be a good option in the future.

Org roam could work if you’re your cool with emacs. Create files on the fly that are named with the date/topic and it could be setup to allow timestamps since you mentioned that. Notes can be linked to each other or easily merge or split as it develops.

Also org roam comes coupled with a daily diary that attaches to emacs calendar system.

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

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.

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

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