A few years ago, the liberation cats of the #Fediverse stopped talking to each other. Not only out of malice, mostly through burnout, distraction, and quiet withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped the #NGO crew.
They didn’t “win” our spaces through better ideas, didn’t persuade anyone. They simply occupied every role that looked like coordination, representation, legitimacy that was funding-adjacency. That’s their native skill set, #NGO people don’t build ecosystems; they replace them with management layers then our history is sold as branding.
This isn’t accidental, it’s a familiar class of friendly parasites that reproduce by feeding on radical paths and left uninterrupted, they will kill again. The painful part is that we saw this coming, and for a moment, we did interrupt it. Projects like #OGB were attempts to embed power visibility, contestability, and trust before capture could harden. But attention drifted, coordination frayed, and then – quite literally – things were blocked.
So here we are again, the mistake, worth being blunt about, is that we keep trying to solve cultural and mythic problems with structural and procedural tools. That’s why everything feels exhausting. We say we’re doing “easy things,” then find ourselves writing documents, attending meetings, moderating tensions, negotiating legitimacy, and fighting over process.
That isn’t easy work, it’s managerial labour. And the unseen and unspoken problem is that the #NGO crew love managerial labour, it’s their home turf. Of course, they take over spaces defined by meetings, boards, frameworks, and legitimacy rituals. Meanwhile, the actual easy things – talking to each other, telling our own history, naming capture when it happens, building small, obvious, human-scale tools, refusing the respectability game – quietly disappear.
Maybe it time, we’re circling back to an opening, one practical path is to stop trying to win positions and instead start delegitimising them. #NGO power flows from chairs that everyone else treats as “necessary.” so #KISS name the chairs as optional, loudly, repeatedly: “This working group does not represent us.”, “This foundation is not the Fediverse.”, “This board speaks for itself, not the commons.” isn’t only confrontation, it’s calm refusal, low energy, high impact. To #KISS restarts the conversation sideways instead of head-on.
Don’t attack NGO spaces directly, they’re designed to absorb critique, instead, encircle them with parallel spaces: messy notes, half-finished proposals, visible disagreements. This is where #OMN-style media matters – aggregate instead of argue, tell the story of what’s happening without asking permission.
Use #4opens as a litmus test, not a manifesto. It works best like this: “Cool project. Let’s do a quick sanity check.” is it: Open code? Open data? Open standards? Open governance? If the answers get vague, defensive, or managerial, that’s your signal. You don’t need to argue, simply don’t invest trust or energy. Capture starves quietly when it isn’t fed.
And yes, calling “mythical people” matters, it’s the missing layer. We don’t just need more frameworks; we need shared stories that make capture feel wrong. Stories of Indymedia before NGOs. Stories of early Fediverse moments that worked. Stories of small, trust-based wins. Stories of projects that died from NGO-isation. We should ritualise these: remembering posts, anniversary threads, public post-mortems, “how we fucked this up last time” stories. This is how cultures defend themselves without rules.
A hard but hopeful truth is that we didn’t fail because the ideas were wrong, we failed because we stopped tending the compost. Compost needs turning, air, moisture, attention. The good news is that compost is forgiving. You don’t need permission to start turning it again.
Calling mythical people – if you’re out there and this still itches, that is people with long memories, allergic to foundations, who build and then disappear, who value trust over scale. Now would be a good time to stop ignoring each other.
Not to “fix” the #Fediverse, just to make it awkward for capture again. That alone would be a big step forward.
