νῆσος

nesos · /ˈne.sos/ · Greek νῆσος — island

A sovereign, federated platform for public discussion & messaging in Cyprus.

See the 12-month plan Source on Codeberg
What it is

nesos is a Reddit-style forum (Lemmy core) with a real-time chat layer (Matrix / Synapse), built trilingual in Greek, Turkish and English from day one. It 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.

Pre-launchThis site is a project brief. The repository is being populated as part of an application to the NLnet NGI0 Commons Fund.
The project, in brief

At a glance

Lead organisation
Agiliton — EU, HQ Cyprus
Primary domain
nesos.cy
Source
codeberg.org/nesos
Federation
ActivityPub
Hosting
Hetzner — 100% EU
Licence — core
AGPL-3.0-or-later
Licence — modules
Apache-2.0
Languages
Ελληνικά · Türkçe · English
The gap it fills

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 it produces reusable infrastructure (an EUDI Wallet Relying Party module, a DSA Statements-of-Reason logger, a multilingual moderation handbook), the artefacts are explicitly designed for adoption by other Fediverse instances EU-wide.

12-month roadmap

What is being built

12-month grant plan · M1 = grant start
M1M2M3M4 M5M6M7M8 M9M10M11M12 FoundationCommunity ComplianceVerification Infrastructure Public governance Trilingual localisation Forum–Matrix integration Federation & moderation DSA compliance layer EUDI Wallet Relying Party Moderation training Accessibility & audit
M1M4M7M10M12
InfrastructureM1–M3
Public governanceM2–M3
Trilingual localisationM2–M6
Forum–Matrix integrationM5–M6
Federation & moderationM3–M5
DSA compliance layerM4–M9
EUDI Wallet Relying PartyM5–M11
Moderation trainingM7–M9
Accessibility & auditM10–M12

M1 = grant start · bar length = duration · day-counts in the work packages below

  1. 01WP1
    Infrastructure18 days · M1–M3Foundation

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

  2. 02WP2
    Trilingual localisation22 days · M2–M6Community

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

  3. 03WP3
    Federation policy & moderation tooling14 days · M3–M5Compliance

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

  4. 04WP4
    DSA compliance layer28 days · M4–M9Compliance

    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 integration32 days · M5–M11Verification

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

  6. 06WP6
    Forum–Matrix integration12 days · M5–M6Community

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

  7. 07WP7
    Public governance & transparency10 days · M2–M3Foundation

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

  8. 08WP8
    Multilingual moderation onboarding14 days · M7–M9Compliance

    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 & documentation18 days · M10–M12Verification

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

Get involved

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 — 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.