55 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
55 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: "Please welcome Calendar.social"
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date: 2018-06-26 05:36:00
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tags: [development]
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published: true
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author:
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name: Gergely Polonkai
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email: gergely@polonkai.eu
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---
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I started looking at decentralised/federated tools some years ago, but other than Matrix I didn’t
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use any of them until recently. Then this February I joined the Fediverse (federated universe) by
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spinning up my own [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) instance. I’m not going to lie, this
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place is pure awesome. I follow only 53 people but unlike on Twitter or Facebook, I can’t just
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scroll through my timeline; I have to read the all. These 53 accounts are real persons over the
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Internet with meaningful posts. I could never find this on the noisy Twitter or Facebook timeline
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during the last 10 or so years.
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Bragging aside, and given my strive for learning, I wanted to give back something to this
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community. I thought about an image sharing platform where people can share their photo albums
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with each other, but I realised I’m not that good at image handling. So I decided to make a
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calendar instead.
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My app, creatively codenamed Calendar.social, aims to be a calendar service similar to Google
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Calendar (and, obviously, any calendar app you can find out there) but instead of using emails, it
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will use ActivityPub to share all the details (although I might add e-mail support sooner or
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later.)
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I have a *lot* on my mind about what this tool should/could do when it’s done. In no particular
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order, here’s a list of them:
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- events that can be private (only you and the (optional) guests see them), or public (anyone can
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see them). They will have all the usual fields like start/end time, location, and maybe an icon
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and a cover photo
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- multiple calendars you would expect from a calendar app. This way you can separate your
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birthday reminders from the dentist appointments
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- event sharing over ActivityPub and other channels (to be decided, but I think you can take email
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and maybe Matrix for granted.)
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- full calendar sharing. The other party can get access from a very basic free/busy level to full
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write access (which might be a good idea for family or company wide calendars.)
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- Holiday calendars that store national/bank holidays. Users can subscribe to them to see the
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holidays of a given country/area, and optionally set them as busy (on holiday weekdays) or free
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(on weekends that are actually workdays for some reason.)
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- Reminders! Because you obviously don’t want to forget the birthday of your significant other,
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your anniversary, or your barber appointment.
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- All this developed with time zones, localisation, and accessibility in mind.
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That, and anything more that comes to my mind.
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You can follow the development [here](https://gitea.polonkai.eu/gergely/calendar-social). Also,
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feel free to ping me with your ideas on [Mastodon](https://social.polonkai.eu/@gergely),
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[Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/@gergely:polonkai.eu), or any other channels you can find under the
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“Contact me” menu.
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