νῆσος

nesos /ˈne.sos/ Greek νῆσος — island

A sovereign, federated, public-discussion platform for Cyprus.

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nesos is a Reddit-style forum (Lemmy core) with an optional real-time chat layer (Matrix / Synapse), built trilingual in Greek, Turkish, and English from day one. The platform federates over ActivityPub with the existing Threadiverse, runs on EU-owned infrastructure, is Digital Services Act-compliant by design, and integrates as an EUDI Wallet Relying Party using OpenID4VP.

Pre-launch This site is a project brief. The repository is being populated as part of an application to the NLnet NGI0 Commons Fund.
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At a glance

Lead organisation
Agiliton — EU-registered, headquartered in Cyprus
Primary domain
nesos.cy
Source
codeberg.org/nesos
Federation
ActivityPub (Threadiverse)
Hosting
Hetzner (100% EU)
Licence — core
AGPL-3.0-or-later (Lemmy-derived)
Licence — modules
Apache-2.0 (EUDI RP module, DSA logger, moderation templates)
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Why nesos

Cyprus, one of the EU's smallest and most geopolitically exposed member states, has no sovereign infrastructure for public civic discussion. Cypriot communities currently rely on US-controlled platforms — Reddit, Discord, Facebook groups — that are commercially extractive, structurally opaque, vulnerable to single-jurisdiction policy shifts, and indifferent to multilingual moderation needs.

nesos addresses that gap. It is not a fork of Lemmy and not a competitor to the Threadiverse — it is a deployment, an integration project, and a public-interest commitment to operate the result. Where this project produces reusable infrastructure (EUDI Wallet Relying Party module, DSA Statements-of-Reason logger, multilingual moderation handbook), the artefacts are explicitly designed for adoption by other Fediverse instances EU-wide.

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What is being built

12-month grant plan · M1 = grant start
M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11 M12 Foundation Community Compliance Verification WP1 · Infrastructure 18 d WP7 · Public governance 10 d WP2 · Trilingual localisation 22 d WP6 · Forum–Matrix integration 12 d WP3 · Federation & moderation 14 d WP4 · DSA compliance layer 28 d WP5 · EUDI Wallet Relying Party 32 d WP8 · Moderation training 14 d WP9 · Accessibility & audit 18 d

M1 = grant start · bar length = elapsed time · day-count in parens

  1. 01WP1
    Infrastructure 18 days · M1–M3 Foundation

    Production Lemmy + Synapse deployment on Hetzner, with monitoring, automated backup, and a documented disaster-recovery runbook.

  2. 02WP2
    Trilingual localisation 22 days · M2–M6 Community

    Greek (Cypriot variant), Turkish (Cypriot variant), English; upstream contributions to Lemmy, lemmy-ui, and Element.

  3. 03WP3
    Federation policy & moderation tooling 14 days · M3–M5 Compliance

    Public defederation policy, Draupnir integration for Matrix moderation, public mod-log API.

  4. 04WP4
    DSA compliance layer 28 days · M4–M9 Compliance

    Notice & Action flow, Statements of Reason logging conforming to Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835, automated Transparency Database export, Trusted Flagger onboarding (DSA Article 22).

  5. 05WP5
    EUDI Wallet Relying Party integration 32 days · M5–M11 Verification

    OpenID4VP module, SIOPv2 binding, “verified resident” badge using SD-JWT selective disclosure; published as a reusable open-source library.

  6. 06WP6
    Forum–Matrix integration 12 days · M5–M6 Community

    Shared OIDC SSO, Hookshot bridge for community-room mirroring.

  7. 07WP7
    Public governance & transparency 10 days · M2–M3 Foundation

    Advisory Board recruitment, decision log, quarterly financial transparency. See governance.md.

  8. 08WP8
    Multilingual moderation onboarding 14 days · M7–M9 Compliance

    Moderator handbook in EL / TR / EN, training on de-escalation and recognition of hate speech under Cypriot Law 134(I)/2011 and Article 99A of the Criminal Code.

  9. 09WP9
    Accessibility, security audit & documentation 18 days · M10–M12 Verification

    WCAG 2.2 AA audit, OWASP ASVS Level 2 self-pentest supplemented by Radically Open Security review (NLnet free track), public documentation site.

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How to engage

Code contributions via Codeberg PRs; issues are public. Greek and Turkish native speakers are particularly welcome for localisation — micro-contracts available during the grant phase.

Contact

General & security:
service@agiliton.eu

Acknowledgements

This work builds on substantial open-source effort by the Lemmy maintainers, the Matrix.org Foundation, the Element / Synapse team, the pict-rs author, the Draupnir project, and the Sphereon SSI-SDK and walt.id communities. Where this project produces work suitable for upstream merge, contributions are made directly to those projects; nesos does not fork.

Funding has been applied for to the NLnet NGI0 Commons Fund. The NGI0 Commons Fund is established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.