immersionlog

One account to track everything you consume in Japanese — anime, manga, visual novels, light novels, books, movies, series, YouTube, podcasts, drama CDs, games — with the language-learning metrics layered on top: hours, characters, streaks, levels, goals, rankings and clubs.

Think Toggl for immersion, with a library attached.

What it does

• Timer + backdated logging. Start a timer against anything in your library (or a free-form label), or log a past session with duration and native units (episodes, chapters, pages, characters…).
• Log in an instant (/log/new): pick a medium → search your library and AniList / VNDB / TMDB / Google Books → fill in the details. New titles are added to your library automatically, with covers, Japanese titles and known lengths.
• Library with status (planning / in progress / paused / finished / dropped), progress in native units capped at the known total, ratings, notes. Sessions bump progress automatically; hitting the total auto-finishes.
• History: any day, week, month, year or custom range; per-day/week/month charts; heatmap; by-type and top-item breakdowns.
• Progression: XP (1 XP per minute, so every medium is worth the same), overall / reading / listening levels, current and longest streak, daily averages, reading speed (chars/hour), month-over-month comparison.
• Goals: "1000 hours in 2026", "2M characters of VNs this month" — any metric, any medium, any period, with an on-pace marker.
• Discover: trending anime, manga and light novels from AniList plus the most-voted visual novels from VNDB, with cover art. Tap a cover and it lands in your library.
• Community: an activity feed (everyone, or just the people you follow), follows, kudos on sessions, a member directory, and public profile pages showing what someone is on right now.
• Ranking: global and per-medium leaderboards (week / month / year / all time), rankable against everyone or only the people you follow; opt out in settings.
• Clubs: public or private (join code), tagged, up to 100 members, member leaderboard, and voting on what to consume together next.
• Texthooker: connect LunaTranslator (ws://localhost:2333/api/ws/text/origin) or Textractor (ws://localhost:6677) from the browser; lines stream in, characters and active time (idle gaps excluded) are counted, and one click saves the session against your VN.

Navigation

Five destinations — Home, Library, Discover, Community, Stats — plus one Log button. Everything else (session log, goals, texthooker, settings, your profile) lives in the account menu. On phones the same five become a bottom tab bar with logging in the middle.

Signed-out visitors get a public landing page at / with live community numbers; everything else redirects to /login.

Stack

Next.js 16 (App Router, server actions) · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 + shadcn/ui (Base UI) · Drizzle ORM · Postgres (PGlite embedded for local dev) · Better Auth (email + password).

Getting started

pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then set BETTER_AUTH_SECRET (see the file)
pnpm db:push                 # creates ./.pglite with the schema
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000, create an account, add something to your library, start the timer.

Demo data

The community pages are dull with one account, so there is a seeder:

pnpm seed:demo            # ~9 demo members, real covers from AniList/VNDB, months of sessions, follows, kudos, a club
pnpm seed:demo --reset    # delete previously seeded demo members first

Demo accounts are real accounts you can sign in as: <handle>@demo.immersionlog.com / immerse-demo-2026 (handles are printed at the end of the run). They are recognisable by that email domain, which is also how --reset finds them — never run the seeder against a production database.

Environment

AniList and VNDB need no keys.

Local database (PGlite)

Without DATABASE_URL the app uses an embedded Postgres in ./.pglite. It is single-process: stop pnpm dev before running pnpm db:push or pnpm build, otherwise the data directory can be corrupted (delete ./.pglite and push again if that happens).

Scripts

Data model

media_items          shared across users; deduplicated on (source, source_id); cover + banner art
library_entries      user × item: status, progress (native unit), rating, notes
immersion_sessions   the core primitive: started_at, duration, optional item, optional amount + unit
active_timers        one running timer per user
goals                metric (time | unit), optional media type, date range, target
follows              directed, no approval; private profiles never appear in feeds or rankings
session_kudos        one heart per (session, user)
clubs / club_members / club_picks / club_pick_votes

Time is the common denominator (all sessions have a duration); native units stay per-medium. Days are bucketed in the user's timezone (captured at signup, editable in settings).

Texthooker notes

The Texthooker page opens a WebSocket from your browser to your own machine; nothing about your game text touches the server until you press Save session. Each message is treated as one line (plain text, or JSON with a text field). Characters are counted excluding whitespace and punctuation. Gaps between lines longer than the idle threshold (default 3 min) are not counted as reading time.