user journal access in polyanthum

In polyanthum we run services in systemd as a user (placing them in ~/.config/systemd/user). As rdsys user I can access my services correctly with systemctl --user, but journalctl --user does say:

rdsys@polyanthum:~$ journalctl
Hint: You are currently not seeing messages from other users and the system.
      Users in the 'systemd-journal' group can see all messages. Pass -q to
      turn off this notice.
No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions.

Also systemctl --user status doesn't display any logs.

I'm deploying a new service rdsys-moat (tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys#61 (closed)) which fails to start but I can only see the errors if I run the command by hand, not in the journal.

Can I get access to the journal? Or should I configure all my services to write their logs into a file?