PolyamorOSS - Google Calendar Alternatives

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.