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Contact management

I am looking for a contact manager to replace a google account or iCloud account.

I am currently on iOS (and actively dislike it after being on android since forever) and looking to increase my privacy by cutting ties with my google accounts.

A Google account presently manages my contacts, and I do not want iOS to take over this job, I’d rather manage them myself.

I tried searching for FOSS contact managers but all I found was client relation software which isn’t what I want at all…. I don’t think.. I just want my phone numbers and names saved for easy personal use.

Is there anything good for managing a personal phone book?

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8 comments
  • Do you mean something like CalDAV? There are some solutions listed on the awesome-selfhosted github list

    • If what I’m seeing is right, then… maybe? I don’t care about the calendar at this point (solid chance I never will; I try to find it useful and my adhd prevents that - need more reminder options like “remind me every 25 minutes until I do something about it” and “remind me 2 days prior in case I forgot to accommodate it”), just the contact management.

      The GitHub seems to have some stuff that might be what I’m looking for though, so link is appreciated. I have no idea what to do with this, but a good starting point (am mostly noob, looking for things to look into in October when I have a bunch of free time. I already need to learn docker for other reasons 😅)

      Thanks for the help, I’ll do some digging :)

      • Please do. Maybe you‘ll find something useful. I found radicale working best for me (it was easy to install and selfhost). Selfhosting covers many topics, so it‘s difficult to share additional links here. But if you do a websearch, you should find good tutorials. Try to host in the local network first, and install a VPN to access services like CalDAV or CardDAV on the road. This will keep you from spending time on additional security considerations when hosting something on a public accessible host, which can be overwhelming when still being at the beginning.

  • Nextcloud can do this and replace a bunch of other google services in the process.

    Looking at what you said so far though I am not entirely sure if you want to go down the route of self hosting yet. Which is okay, it involves a lot of work and knowledge to do right. Something you might not want to risk your contacts for if you are still learing. There are services that provide nextcloud hosting. Personally I am using Hetzner, a Germany based hosting provider: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

    Edit:

    I forgot to mention, you'll also need to do some fiddling with your phone to sync things: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/groupware/sync_android.html

    • I’m already self hosting a media server and have been for 10+ years. have a vpn and all, but it is also accessible outside of my network (usually).

      However it’s a very basic setup that I intend to redo to make it substantially more robust and somewhat automated, and I need to learn a ton of stuff to do so which will scaffold for this stuff. I keep hearing the same words, so at least I know what to look into :)

      I have a decent list of self hosting software to look into for various things, I just haven’t had time to pursue it, but I’m about to have plenty of time :)

  • Just a quick comment about Nextcloud. I host that on my media center (which runs Ubuntu) which is inside my LAN. It can sync CalDAV and CardDAV stuff. Just mentioning as a real world example. We also use it to share files, tasks, sync Joplin, etc. Really handy. Not sure I'd want to keep up with patches and security on the public net, but on my LAN I think it is fine.

    Other more expensive direction, I wonder if there is a Synology product that would do it. People seam to rave about Synology NAS.

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