Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted

Show HN: Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted(github.com)

12 points by micstradev 6 hours ago | 5 comments

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

weakfish 15 minutes ago |

> AI Echo

I don't think it's fair to these very real humans to try and distill their essence from what they presented publicly. Real humans are messy and complicated.

This feels really, really disrespectful. Just because someone died a long time ago doesn't mean it's any less weird to do digital necromancy.

jstanley 12 minutes ago | |

I think "echo" is a fine word to use, they're hardly calling them "reincarnations".

weakfish 9 minutes ago | | |

Wording aside, I think the concept is icky.

tetrisgm 43 minutes ago |

Very interesting idea. Is this an experiment or something you’re looking to grow as a business? I’m curious about how this thing will evolve.

I would totally use a version of this for Swift programming

micstradev 28 minutes ago | |

Thanks. I put 3 years of my life to build it, founded a nonprofit, so it is more than an experiment. In regards of business, it stays nonprofit, no investors, no exit. We will provide free messages and we will continue running our gpu servers in the long run. Our goal is to make wisdom and philosophy accessible. What will change in the next 6 to 12 months is that the complete content will transition to CC-BY 4.0. The plan is also that the development is community driven, user who engage earn voting power to vote for the next features.