While the overlap from polyamory to FOSS may not be huge, I’m sure at
least some of you out there want something that isn’t Google, right?
A lot of people every year are hearing about why you probably
shouldn’t use most products from big tech companies. While it’s not
always feasible to make the jump with, say, social applications (good
luck convincing everyone you know to hop ship from Discord to
XMPP), this is something that’s perfectly feasible while still
maintaining most functionality. If you can get a little cooperation
from the people you’re sharing with, you can even maintain full
functionality!
Why switch?
Google’s selling your information to advertisers, that’s true. It’s
also one of the most ubiquitous software suites of the modern day, and
even their calendar functions obtusely. You can’t even manually set
the timezone of a calendar you’re subscribing to.
The only real reason to switch, in this case, is because Google is an
evil company and should be avoided where possible.
Picking a calendar management system
Onto the hard part: Actually getting a cloud calendar provider. How
do you do that? Well, first off, you don’t actually have to.
You can just use Thunderbird. Or any email client. Pretty much all
of them have a calendar application, and at least Thunderbird supports
exporting and importing calendars as .ics files. You can send that
file to your partner/friend/whatever, and tell them to plug it into
their calendar, and it’ll do. Granted, they won’t get live updates,
so it’s annoying, but it will work.
For a cloud-based solution I went with a Nextcloud provider. You do
have the option to host your own, which I may eventually cover, but
it’s not super difficult if you use something like YUNoHost to get it
started. Once you have that, you can make your calendar, and then
just… share it. Either with a subscription link, if you want your
partners to have the option to use a calendar app, or they can just
use a link viewable in a web browser, and bookmark it.
There are other options, even through YUNoHost, like Baikal, and even
Hubzilla. You can check around to see something that works well for
you.
Picking a client
For desktop I just use Thunderbird. I had a more complicated setup
with Emacs, as I normally attempt, but I realized I like Emacs as a
text editor, and very little else.
Thunderbird’s been around for a while, it’s made by Mozilla, and has a
respectable email/calendar interface, which is what I want with email
anyway.
For mobile, I decided to go with Fossify Calendar. I like what they
do, and they’re available through F-Droid, but the built in calendar
app with your phone will probably not work. I did try with Android’s,
and I couldn’t find a way to do a subscription. GMail will let you,
but I had issues with the time zones? It assumed the calendar was in
GMT, even though it wasn’t set to GMT, and then wouldn’t let me change
it. Admittedly I am very, very impatient with Google at this point,
so this could have been user error.
Besides that there are honestly a ton of calendar clients, you can
just search around for a few. The bookmark solution works fine for me
and my polycule, because nobody really uses this for notifications of
other people’s stuff, just to check for scheduling.
The other direction
So you’ve got a privacy-obsessed weirdo (affectionate) in your life,
and they need to be able to see your non-privacy-obsessed calendars.
What do we do?
That’s actually not too bad: From the web view, hover over the
calendar you want to share, click the three vertical dots, and then
click settings. From there you can scroll down and there’s a section
that has a public link, which gives a web view. There’s also a link
that’s labeled “Public address in iCal format”, which will allow other
people to subscribe to the calendar from something like Fossify or
Thunderbird.
Other useful apps
Honestly I’m not aware of any at this point. The big one was just the
calendar, because GCal is so ubiquitous in polyam circles that it can
feel as impossible as chat clients to switch, but there are always options.
The end
While it’s hard to switch off of Google, it’s well worth it in the
end. Not only are you not being constantly tracked by someone who’s
trying to sell your time and attention for money, you also do
generally end up with something that’s built to your interest.
Remember: If you’re not paying, you’re the product. And that business
model has made companies like Google make their products worse, on
purpose, because they wanted to make their shareholders more money.