Data should remain under our own control. In 2023, we were once again able to realize this ambition in two major projects. A messenger for schools and a European media portal were developed using open source frameworks and open standards and put into operation on an autonomous technical infrastructure.
We also supported a customer in setting up their own kubernetes cluster. And we expanded our own to 448 GB RAM and 64 CPU cores. We were also able to bring the video conferencing service fairmeeting, additional Mastodon instances and PeerTube instances with a dedicated rendering node into high-availability cloud computing.
Another candidate that we want to bring into the cluster in 2024 is the metasearch engine fairsuch. This searches other large and small search engines, but without passing on profiles or displaying advertising. In addition, results from Wikipedia or Wikivoyage are woven in - making the search result much more colorful. fairsuch is still in the fairapps lab stage, and is unfortunately now blocked by some search engines if we send too many queries. With the distributed cloud computing approach, we may be able to win the cat and mouse game in the future.
A trade-off with convenience is whether we continue to offer login with a Google or Apple login. Our recommendation is to offer a new registration for a fairlogin account only with an e-mail address.
But not everyone wants to manage a new password. We also do not pass on to federated ID providers which of the fairapps services is then used - fairlogin also acts as a proxy here, i.e. as an intermediate layer that only carries out authentication. We will continue to discuss whether and how much we can hide from GAFAM in the future, for example, we also receive and send emails to Gmail, which is what our users want.
We are proud of the fact that almost all business processes now run in our self-hosted ERP system with ERPnext. We not only use it to process orders, invoices and project management, but now also for accounting. We will port the online store back to ERPnext in 2024.
The migration of the fairchat service from RocketChat to Matrix is also on the agenda for 2024. We are already operating our own push gateway for this and we want to be able to transmit push messages without Firebase in the future. If you don't want this now, you can switch it off in the preferences for notifications in fairchat.
Probably our most important service for maintaining your own data sovereignty is the faircloud. This allows not only files, but also calendars or address books to be hosted outside of Google or Apple and synchronized on multiple end devices. Here, too, we massively expanded the capacity for the main server in 2023 and added dedicated instances of nextcloud for some customers.
For more details, how we deal with privacy, see fairkom's Datenschutzrichtlinien.
