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

Details

External ID
48459913
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted
Website domain
github.com
Launched
June 9, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
49
Upvotes percentile
0.8442622950819673
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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

Enrichment

Theme
niche social and community platforms
Vertical
Education
Function
Content generation
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
learning platform for historical figures
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes This is a chatbot wrapper that prompts an LLM with specific historical figure personas using standard system prompts and a self-hosted UI.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Primary texts aggregation for LLM context

Concerns raised: AI generates simulacra that may mislead by pretending to know inner world of historical figures, Hallucinations could conflict with historical accuracy, Putting words in mouths of dead people lacks scholarly standards historians follow, Cannot capture messy, complicated human beings accurately

Feature requests: Library interface with extractable primary texts and context management UI, Text-only mode as default (audio currently default), Add Hermann Hesse as historical figure, Better implementation of experiential practice exercises

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 52 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #9 of 53 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 223 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.