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 closes that gap by building what every EU Fediverse operator now needs but none can obtain off the shelf: a DSA Statements-of-Reason logging library conforming to Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835, and an EUDI Wallet Relying Party module for federated social software — both Apache-2.0, both designed for reuse far beyond Cyprus. These reusable modules are the R&D core; the trilingual Cyprus deployment is where they are proven in production, then handed on.

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
    Infrastructure10 days · M1–M3Foundation

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

  2. 02WP2
    Trilingual localisation6 days + micro-contracts · M2–M6Community

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

  3. 03WP3
    Federation policy & moderation tooling6 days · M3–M5Compliance

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

  4. 04WP4
    DSA compliance layer18 days · R&D core · M4–M9Compliance

    Notice & Action flow and a reusable Statements-of-Reason logging library conforming to Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2835, plus automated Transparency Database export. Trusted Flagger onboarding (Article 22) and Article 27 hooks deferred to phase 2.

  5. 05WP5
    EUDI Wallet Relying Party integration (v0.1)16 days · R&D core · M5–M11Verification

    OpenID4VP Relying Party module, authentication-only, published as a reusable Apache-2.0 library for any Fediverse instance. SIOPv2 binding and the SD-JWT "verified resident" badge deferred to phase 2 (v0.2).

  6. 06WP6
    Forum–Matrix integration4 days · M5–M6Community

    Shared, self-hosted OIDC single-sign-on across forum and Matrix — one account, no third-party identity dependency. Hookshot room-mirroring bridge deferred to phase 2.

  7. 07WP7
    Public governance & transparency4 days · M2–M3Foundation

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

  8. 08WP8
    Multilingual moderation onboarding4 days + micro-contracts · 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 review & documentation6 days · M10–M12Verification

    WCAG 2.2 AA self-audit, a coordinated Radically Open Security review (NLnet free track) targeting the WP4–WP5 modules, and a public documentation site with module integration guides.

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.