Help me not give in to proprietary social media / tracking
Aaron Wolf at 2015-07-14T15:43:00Z
I'm struggling folks. I have too many contacts to sort, and I just am finding Thunderbird's contact management clunky and inefficient and have complaints about Kontact… I mean, if this is all there was, I could live with it, but I feel like I'm constantly fighting things. When I use Google Contacts, I'm fighting another battle — telling Google who I know. I hate this.
At some level, this is an impossible battle. Nearly everyone is on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and Google whatever and so on. If I connect with people and want to note my contacts, I can't manage to clutter my personal contacts with hundreds of entries unless I can really effectively sort them, such as with tags that are easy to filter quickly.
I want to mark all the different sorts of contacts on my own private system and not tell corporations who I know. But I feel like this is eating all my time and energy. I'm about ready to give in and just finally more actively connect with everyone on LinkedIn and Twitter (ugh!!) — of course, I'll still use pump.io and some private notes and such but…
What should I do? It feels like useless self-sacrifice sometimes to just avoid these things unless I can find a solution that is truly powerful enough otherwise.
Please please please come help us build Snowdrift.coop, donate to our development etc. — I can't see any other way out of this conundrum other than really changing the economy and better funding free/libre/open solutions.
Anyway, I did check out Owncloud's contacts which are okay, but there's no search feature even. Etc. etc. everything is just about usable and not good. I would love to hear about something promising or a better solution…
Doug Whitfield shared this.
I don't care if it's a web interface. I basically wish that Thunderbird's contact system was actually flexible and well-designed, then I'd be happy.
I want to manage hundreds of contacts and be able to tag them well so it is easy to focus on relevant contacts for various purposes. And I want a nice interface, easy to make notes and to add any arbitrary amount of emails, relationships, websites etc.
Google Contacts is closest but fundamentally compromises my control and privacy. Otherwise, Thunderbird, Kontact, and Owncloud all have mixed pros and cons where none is quite acceptable.
Sounds like a job for mind-mapping software.
There's no good way to manage arbitrary amounts of tags, groups, labeled phone numbers and emails etc. in spreadsheets or plain DB without a decent GUI.