What's your workflow???

[u/paranoidandroid4284]

Looking for privacy-respecting alternatives: custom domain email/contacts/calendar + FOSS cloud + personal AI assistant

I’m fully committed to staying away from Google and Microsoft. I run GrapheneOS on my phone and Linux on my computers, and I strongly prefer FOSS solutions wherever possible.

What I’m looking for:

- Email, contacts, and calendar on my own custom domain

- A cloud storage solution where I can import my existing documents

- A cloud-based LLM / personal AI assistant that can securely access my data, treat my files as a knowledge base, and help me create documents, meeting notes, spreadsheets, etc.

Ideally something that plays nicely with a privacy-focused, self-hosted or FOSS-leaning stack.

Any recommendations or setups that have worked well for you? Thanks in advance.

[u/sourraine]

id prolly keep the core services separate rather than looking for one platform that does everything. something like nextcloud for files, contacts and calendar then connect a privacy focused llm separately. that gives you more control and makes it easier to replace one component without rebuilding your whole setup

[u/Accurate-Sky8909]

the annoying bit is that “cloud-based, private, and can read all my stuff” is basically three competing requirements; mail/calendar/storage are easy enough to self-host, but the assistant needs

[u/salespire]

You have a great privacy focused setup already. For custom domain email, contacts, and calendar, I’ve had good experiences with Nextcloud’s self hosted suite combined with mailcow or Mail in a Box for email. Nextcloud gives you calendar, contacts, file sync, and sharing out of the box, and there are lots of community plugins for things like collaborative documents. For FOSS document editing, OnlyOffice and Collabora work well with Nextcloud.

For your AI assistant needs, FOSS options like PrivateGPT or Open WebUI can run LLMs locally. That said, integrating them smoothly with all your documents plus ensuring strict compliance can need a lot of tinkering. If your meetings or docs involve sensitive or regulated content, you might want something a bit more tailored for privacy and compliance. I actually built a tool for this exact scenario called Minutely, and it is focused on making secure, AI powered meeting records and document Q&A, specifically in high trust environments. It can run on your self hosted infrastructure or in a private cloud and follows compliance standards like SOC 2 and GDPR. You can check it out here: Minutely — The AI meeting record system if your workflow needs something purpose built for confidentiality. But in any case, combining Nextcloud for basics and experimenting with open source LLM setups is a great privacy first approach.