Kyberia is an independent and innovative archipelago of digital commu-
nities that emerged in 2001 on the Slovak domain kyberia.sk. Initially
a website informing the Slovak public about topics that were ignored
on the Slovak web at the time (e.g. trans- and post-humanist philos-
ophies, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, entheogens). Kyberia
swiftly evolved first into a threaded forum and subsequently into a
fully-fledged digital community where hackers, artists and scientists
were able to interact in a densely hyperlinked graph.

The current version released in 2006 focused more on internal K-econ-
omy and the politics of the community. More concretely, a Senate was
created and first trials to allow the system to auto-configure by using
the parallel democracy model were run. In 2007 Kyberia won the prize of
distinction as a “best Slovak virtual community” in the biggest public
competition ever organized on the Slovak web. In 2010 code of Kybe­
ria’s engine was released on GitHub under AGPL and the community
was expanded into Czech cyberspace, where a parallel community was
launched on the kyberia.cz domain.

In over ten years of existence, Kyberia has transformed itself from a
science and hackers’ community into a more mainstream communi-
ty of thousands of active users discussing myriads diverse topics in
more than seven million parallel forums, blogs and/or data nodes. One
of the most characteristic features that, we believe, transformed Ky­
beria into a social body with a collective identity is that Kyberia has a
semipermeable membrane (which means that any registration appli-
cation of a new user has to be approved by at least five members of
the kyberia.sk Senate), a upvoting system implemented years before
Facebook’s “Like” button. Other features worth mentioning include a
flexible (node-specific) system of access right attribution, an internal
bookmarking and mailing system and API templates. These were inno-
vative in the period when they were released, although today they are
common in other social networks as well.