4 ms·

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" Exactly that's the reason I want to drop all Google products. Until now I found an alternative to Gmail. Google

by id122015 11y ago

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" Exactly that's the reason I want to drop all Google products. Until now I found an alternative to Gmail. Google Reader went bust and I live happily without it. Google Calendar is the last bit I need to find an alternative for. I thought that all you hackers here are more independent than me. Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality.

afarrell 11y ago
> Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? 1) Because it would take months. 2) Because it would probably be hard to make it integrate with other things like Calendly.
- wjoe 11y ago
  There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc. It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
- JoBrad 11y ago
  Also, to be as effective as Google Calendar, you'd have to end up integrating it with as many external sources as Google Calendar, decreasing any privacy you might have gained by making your own product.
joseluis 11y ago
If you don't mind sharing, what is the alternative you found to Gmail? I couldn't find any satisfying.
buro9 11y ago
Everything in my Google Calendar is already out there somewhere. Nothing private is in it. All I'm doing is making all of that data useful to me. It's not anything that isn't already available to someone or everyone. I compartmentalise public and private, but don't consider things that create metadata elsewhere on the internet to be private. Anything public, is in my calendar. Also... > Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality. Time is hard. Places are hard. Being able to describe an event that is "Flight BA0285 from LHR to SFO" involves a single event over a duration of time, that crosses time zones, and maybe daylight savings, whilst changing places. And further knowing that BA0285 is a flight number and then informing you of delays. This stuff is way harder than it initially looks, and makes me really appreciate just how right Google got this.
qznc 11y ago
Radicale: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvjc2dgdn27n5pt66mxa40m1h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvj... Unfortunately, it does not work well enough. So I have not switched yet. It is close for me, so I keep an eye on it.
- wjoe 11y ago
  Baikal [1] is another alternative. It works fine for me. Unfortunately CalDAV is quite an awkward standard for calendars and not supported by everything, so none of these implementations are perfect, but for my purposes it works well and I've found enough things that support it. It also supports CardDAV which can be used for contact syncing. [1] http://baikal-server.com/ http://baikal-server.com/
erikb 11y ago
I have an Ubuntu laptop, a Macbook, a Windows 8 desktop computer, an iPhone and an Android tablet. You can't even write a website to fit all these sizes on your own, and some of them are a pain in the ass if it comes to using shells or ssh (the iPhone and the Windows computer more than the rest). Google is the only product line I know of that keeps all my data in a fashion that I can access it and make use of it (i.e. respond to messages from others and get reminded of appointments etc)
VLM 11y ago
No one else mentioned network effects. I have a shared family calendar for my wife, son (readonly), and myself. Also my son's scout pack used a shared calendar for his meetings. And I was the treasurer for a volunteer org and they drank the goog koolaide top to bottom. Its not just using owncloud calendar, but making it 100% interoperable all the time with the rest of the network, which has agency and as per the linked article they change stuff when THEY feel like it because they're SaaS, not when its convenient for me to develop and test interoperability. Finally it a very low level tool. I have a nice set of unfortunately expensive Wiha screwdrivers on my lab bench. That does not mean I'm dependent on Wiha... in less than a half hour I could have dramatically inferior yet more or less interoperable products from Craftsman or no-name Chinese or other on my lab bench. Or, this was typed on an old Dell keyboard, but as a very low level tool I'm not controlled or defined by such a low level tool... its just my primary Model M is plugged into something else at this moment so I'm stuck on an inferior mushy keyboard.
jasonkostempski 11y ago
I'm looking to do the same thing and the best contender so far seems to be FastMail. For $40/yr there's 15GB for mail, 5GB file storage, IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, custom domain and web views for all of it. The DAV stuff is hard to find anywhere else that isn't under a huge price tag.

afarrell 11y ago

> Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? 1) Because it would take months. 2) Because it would probably be hard to make it integrate with other things like Calendly.

wjoe 11y ago
There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc. It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
JoBrad 11y ago
Also, to be as effective as Google Calendar, you'd have to end up integrating it with as many external sources as Google Calendar, decreasing any privacy you might have gained by making your own product.

joseluis 11y ago

If you don't mind sharing, what is the alternative you found to Gmail? I couldn't find any satisfying.

buro9 11y ago

Everything in my Google Calendar is already out there somewhere. Nothing private is in it. All I'm doing is making all of that data useful to me. It's not anything that isn't already available to someone or everyone. I compartmentalise public and private, but don't consider things that create metadata elsewhere on the internet to be private. Anything public, is in my calendar. Also... > Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality. Time is hard. Places are hard. Being able to describe an event that is "Flight BA0285 from LHR to SFO" involves a single event over a duration of time, that crosses time zones, and maybe daylight savings, whilst changing places. And further knowing that BA0285 is a flight number and then informing you of delays. This stuff is way harder than it initially looks, and makes me really appreciate just how right Google got this.

qznc 11y ago

Radicale: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvjc2dgdn27n5pt66mxa40m1h https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8kr4rvyrggvzfvc160htzdt4u5rfvj... Unfortunately, it does not work well enough. So I have not switched yet. It is close for me, so I keep an eye on it.

wjoe 11y ago
Baikal [1] is another alternative. It works fine for me. Unfortunately CalDAV is quite an awkward standard for calendars and not supported by everything, so none of these implementations are perfect, but for my purposes it works well and I've found enough things that support it. It also supports CardDAV which can be used for contact syncing. [1] http://baikal-server.com/ http://baikal-server.com/

erikb 11y ago

I have an Ubuntu laptop, a Macbook, a Windows 8 desktop computer, an iPhone and an Android tablet. You can't even write a website to fit all these sizes on your own, and some of them are a pain in the ass if it comes to using shells or ssh (the iPhone and the Windows computer more than the rest). Google is the only product line I know of that keeps all my data in a fashion that I can access it and make use of it (i.e. respond to messages from others and get reminded of appointments etc)

VLM 11y ago

No one else mentioned network effects. I have a shared family calendar for my wife, son (readonly), and myself. Also my son's scout pack used a shared calendar for his meetings. And I was the treasurer for a volunteer org and they drank the goog koolaide top to bottom. Its not just using owncloud calendar, but making it 100% interoperable all the time with the rest of the network, which has agency and as per the linked article they change stuff when THEY feel like it because they're SaaS, not when its convenient for me to develop and test interoperability. Finally it a very low level tool. I have a nice set of unfortunately expensive Wiha screwdrivers on my lab bench. That does not mean I'm dependent on Wiha... in less than a half hour I could have dramatically inferior yet more or less interoperable products from Craftsman or no-name Chinese or other on my lab bench. Or, this was typed on an old Dell keyboard, but as a very low level tool I'm not controlled or defined by such a low level tool... its just my primary Model M is plugged into something else at this moment so I'm stuck on an inferior mushy keyboard.

jasonkostempski 11y ago

I'm looking to do the same thing and the best contender so far seems to be FastMail. For $40/yr there's 15GB for mail, 5GB file storage, IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, custom domain and web views for all of it. The DAV stuff is hard to find anywhere else that isn't under a huge price tag.