You should at least play around with the export options and do regular exports. You really don't want your diary of over 5 years to be stuck in an unmaintained app. And since this seems to be supporting exporting into markdown - maybe try an export and checkout logseq or Obsidian?

If you want a proper journaling app :

Inner Ink

Linked

Rednotebook seems solid

Having markdown means you can use it in a variety of apps but I'm not sure how many have encryption (obsidian and joplin maybe?)

You could also try Trilium Next

I also found Darkwrite. Can export as HTML

Ghostwriter is another good and simpler one for Linux

QOwnNotes is a fast loading, Qt based, plaintext editor that supports markdown and preview, plenty of helpful plugins, heavily customizable, has nextcloud support, supports workspaces in the form of note folders.

No affiliation but a happy user and also sponsor it.

why is it pinging the github server every minute??

cosmic@pop-os:~$ sudo tcpdump | grep "github"

[sudo] password for cosmic:

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v[v]... for full protocol decode

listening on enp1s0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), snapshot length 262144 bytes

03:12:25.287023 IP pop-os.58602 > fw.domain: 11618+ [1au] A? github.com. (39)

03:12:25.358983 IP pop-os.39648 > lb-140-82-116-3-sea.github.com.https: Flags [S], seq 4137790427, win 64240, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 2108472627 ecr 0,nop,wscale 7], length 0

03:12:25.423103 IP lb-140-82-116-3-sea.github.com.https > pop-os.39648: Flags [S.], seq 1114499144, ack 4137790428, win 65160, options [mss 1360,sackOK,TS val 2211975173 ecr 2108472627,nop,wscale 8], length 0

03:12:25.423162 IP pop-os.39648 > lb-140-82-116-3-sea.github.com.https: Flags [.], ack 1, win 502, options [nop,nop,TS val 2108472691 ecr 2211975173], length 0

03:12:25.428280 IP pop-os.39648 > lb-140-82-116-3-sea.github.com.https: Flags [P.], seq 1:518, ack 1, win 502, options [nop,nop,TS val 2108472696 ecr 2211975173], length 517