Discussion
Fedi, halp
I meet a lot of people & do a lot of connecting work.
I need a way of quickly getting an overview of who is part of which organizations, scenes and geographical areas. My brain is not enough.
What options are there? FOSS & local are requirements.
I already use #thunderbird - are there extensions I could use?
FOSSdom saw the power of social media and was lured into the trap of trying to outcompete it.
This was a mistake.
The social technology required to create the societies we're looking for must necessarily be _qualitatively_ different.
I can't find a single FOSS app that fully implements all of Vcard. That shit is boring, but it's useful.
I guess there is a psychological attraction to developing social media - you see the users using and talking about your thing!
Me finding my contacts easier, sending emails to the right people easier - building (my) local and regional networks - you won't see that at all. Only nerds will file issues, skewing you ever further away from the average user...
@douginamug
Along with Thunderbird, I also use Nextcloud and Dav5x, so I can quickly enter contacts in on my GrapheneOS (Android) phone and it'll sync things like their organisation, birthday etc and also have them show in Thunderbird for when I'm doing email.
I know this isn't local only, but it's only syncing to a server that I run myself.
@Blort I'm using that stack too! I'm not against encrypted sync with my devices. Do you use a special contact app for graphene or thunderbird, or just the defaults?
Ideally I'd be able to add that a contact is a member of an org, then I would have this org suggested when I start typing it on another contact (like hashtag dropdown suggestion here). Ideally this would create an org "contact" that would list all contact who are members of it...
@douginamug
I really like Fossify Contacts from Fdroid. By default it doesn't show organization, but you can change this in the 3 dot "Manage shown contact fields". It also has a good system for groups, which acts as you've described.
@Blort right, I've been playing around with it!
I added some contacts to a group, and exported one, and they stored the group as a Vcard category. But it does not seem this is synced to my nextcloud...
@douginamug I'm using a knowledge base / personal knowledge management tool for that.
There are quite a few that are more or less open-source (as long as the tool supports backlinks, it should work for that purpose).
I'm currently using Logseq because it had a "journal-first" approach that I like (though not sure I would recommend it at the moment, as it's unclear where the project is going and other similar tools might work better for you).
I basically link people to their institution/lab and location, then when I have a meeting with them, just mention them here.
That way I can find them if I forgot their names and find the notes of all meetings we had together.
@tfardet cool. So you create a note for each person and each org and link them? Any luck with geo ?
I am using Obsidian, to my shame, and I have some internal resistance to using it for contact info. But maybe there is no app which has contact as a native form that has the features I need, and hacking note-taker is easier...
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