About
BITZ Digital Services
A fully self-hosted, open-source digital ecosystem for the BITZ FabLab at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Built on transparency, privacy, and community ownership.
Hover dotted terms for explanations
Services
What We Run
All services are connected via Single Sign-On. Log in once and access everything.
AI Chat
Open WebUI
A ChatGPT-like interface connected to locally running LLMs via Ollama, accelerated by a dedicated NVIDIA RTX 4500 GPU. Your conversations never leave the server.
Encrypted Messaging
Matrix / Element
End-to-end encrypted messaging using the Matrix protocol. Federated by design — communicate with anyone on the global Matrix network while keeping your data on our server.
Social Network
Mastodon
A federated micro-blogging platform. Post updates, follow people across thousands of instances — no ads, no algorithm, no corporate surveillance. Part of the ActivityPub network.
Video Platform
PeerTube
Self-hosted video hosting with live-streaming support via RTMP. Upload, transcode, and share videos. Federated with ActivityPub so content can reach other PeerTube instances.
Video Conferencing
BigBlueButton
A full-featured WebRTC video conferencing system built for education. Includes screen sharing, whiteboard, breakout rooms, and recording — all without relying on proprietary services.
Single Sign-On
Authentik
Our identity provider. SSO across all services using OpenID Connect. Manage your account, enable MFA, and stay in control of your digital identity.
Philosophy
Why Self-Hosting?
In an age of data harvesting and vendor lock-in, running your own services is an act of independence.
Privacy by Default
No data is shared with third parties. Everything runs on hardware we physically control in Bolzano.
Digital Sovereignty
Universities and labs should not depend on big tech for essential digital infrastructure.
Zero Licensing Costs
Every piece of software in this stack is free and open source. The only cost is hardware and bandwidth.
Educational Value
Running your own infrastructure teaches sysadmin, networking, security, and DevOps.
Fully Reproducible
The entire infrastructure is documented step-by-step. Anyone can deploy the same stack.
Federation
Matrix, Mastodon, and PeerTube use open protocols. You're part of a global decentralized network.
Reproduce
Want to Build Your Own?
The entire infrastructure — from bare-metal Proxmox installation to OPNsense firewall, GPU passthrough for AI workloads, and every service configuration — is documented in a comprehensive step-by-step guide.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Contributions welcome.