Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica. This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building. The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months. Agora Cosmica is…
In plain words
Agora Cosmica is an open-source, self-hosted platform that lets users learn from 30 historical figures through AI conversations. Each figure offers 12 narrated stories about their teachings and enables speech-to-speech dialogue. The platform includes four learning modes and a council feature where users can gather multiple figures to discuss topics together. Built by a German nonprofit with code published under AGPL-3.0, it prioritizes user privacy with zero data retention, designed for those uncomfortable sharing personal conversations with large AI providers.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN, I am the founder of Agora Cosmica. This started about three years ago. On a walk I asked a chatbot to interpret the cave dream from Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" as C.G. Jung. It gave me a perspective I had not thought of. But for my own dreams the policies of the big providers felt wrong for so personal conversations, as zero data retention is not available. So I started building. The project evolved to a German nonprofit and we published the code (AGPL-3.0) last month. The content is still copyright, but will be opened to CC-BY 4.0 in the next 6 to 12 months. Agora Cosmica is a library to learn from 30 historical figures. Each one has 12 narrated stories about their teachings / life wisdom, speech to speech conversation. Four learning modes and a council where you can gather the figures to discuss or reflect on a topic. Each figure is an AI Echo, an interpretation grounded in primary works, historical context, with a factcheck per figure to show what's verified versus recreated. On privacy: The speech is self hosted on Hetzner GPU servers, Qwen3-TTS for German, Kokoro TTS for English, Faster-Whisper for transcription. 30 free messages per day (EU-hosted for GDPR), BYOK, or you can run it in a full local self-hosted mode. No conversation is stored, no tracking cookies, no profiling, no signup. The app is slow on purpose. Cosmic, no dopamine rush. The mission is to be a doorway, a first step, an introduction to get people interested and outgrow the app to move to primary texts and human teachers. Live at: https://agoracosmica.org
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