The thankless art of starting something that outgrows you
Note: This is a personal reflection. The thoughts here are my own and don’t represent my employer or the Mac Admins Foundation.
Ten years ago, I helped start a community. It wasn’t some grand act of vision, it was a practical solution to a shared problem. Two friends wanted a space to talk, trade ideas, and feel a little less alone in the work we were doing. That small spark became the Mac Admins Slack, which has since grown into one of the largest and most active communities of its kind.
In those early days, there was no roadmap, no funding, no committee. Just a handful of people improvising. We built channels as the needs arose, wrote guidelines that evolved on the fly, and made judgment calls we hoped were fair. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and deeply human.
For a few years, I poured everything I had into it. I helped write the first versions of our rules, mediated conflicts, onboarded volunteers, and spent countless nights defusing tension before it spread. The bigger the community grew, the heavier the responsibility became. It was meaningful work, but it came at a cost.
And the cost wasn’t only professional or emotional. My life became so entangled with the community that when tensions flared, the fallout bled into places it shouldn’t have. I even lost a relationship because of it; someone I cared deeply about had a falling out with the community and felt they needed to cut ties completely, including with me. That’s the part no one warns you about. When your work and your world overlap too much, a rift in one can break the other.
Eventually, I had to step away. The constant emotional load was taking a toll on my mental health, and I needed to reclaim some space for myself. I thought I’d take a short break. Instead, it turned into years.
The invisible labor of community
Communities, like gardens, don’t thrive on good intentions alone. They need constant tending; watering the conversations, pruning back the conflicts, pulling up the weeds of bad behavior before they spread. And the strange thing is, when you’re doing that work well, no one notices it.
The cleaner the conversation, the calmer the culture, the easier it all looks from the outside. The reward for doing it well is that people forget the work exists at all. There’s no applause for deleting spam or for quietly calming a conflict that could have torn things apart. There’s no visible credit for the late-night message that kept someone from quitting.
The irony of community work is that its success is measured by its invisibility. When it’s working, it looks effortless, and that’s the cruelest illusion of all.
The quiet erasure
A few years after stepping down, I came across a public post thanking my co-founder of the Mac Admins Slack. My name wasn’t there. Instead, I was referred to simply as “a compatriot.”
It caught me off guard. Not in a way that made me angry. More like a soft sting, the ache of being gently erased. The work I’d done still mattered to me, but it no longer existed in the community’s collective memory. And that’s the thing about building something that lasts: it eventually outgrows you.
Communities are living organisms. They molt, they shed, they regrow. They forget. The people who were there at the beginning fade into the background as new energy and leadership take over. That’s natural and healthy. It’s how they survive. But it can still be strange to see your fingerprints wiped away from the walls you helped build.
Coming back to find the door locked
Recently, I found myself with the energy to rejoin the community again. I wasn’t looking to lead, just to participate. But things had changed.
These days, I work for a vendor that happens to be the community’s biggest sponsor. When I joined a discussion on some proposed changes to the Code of Conduct, some members pushed back on my involvement, worried that my employment might compromise neutrality.
I understand that instinct completely. Communities need to protect themselves from bias and influence. What surprised me wasn’t the pushback, it was that the people raising concerns had no idea I’d been there at the start.
That realization wasn’t painful so much as sobering. It reminded me how quickly institutional memory fades, and how easily history gets rewritten by omission. To them, I wasn’t a co-founder returning home, I was just another vendor.
And that’s okay. It’s what happens when something thrives long enough to evolve beyond its beginnings. Still, it made me reflect on how fragile belonging can be, even in spaces you helped create.
The paradox of success
If you do community work well, it scales. Growth is proof of life, but it also changes everything. What began as an intimate circle of shared understanding becomes a sprawling ecosystem. The sense of closeness that defined the early days gives way to new challenges: misunderstandings, mismatched expectations, and the natural tension that comes from trying to serve tens of thousands of people instead of dozens.
At scale, rules replace relationships. The tone of the place changes, sometimes in ways that feel alien to those who were there at the beginning. You tweak policies, try to preserve the spirit of what once was, and remind yourself that this is what success looks like. You’ve built something people care about.
And yet, there’s a quiet grief that comes with realizing that the community no longer needs you. And maybe doesn’t even want you. The better you do your job, the less it depends on you. The more vibrant it becomes, the more it forgets your name.
What remains
Despite all that, I don’t regret stepping back. I don’t regret returning, either. Watching something you helped start continue to grow and evolve long after you’ve stopped steering it is its own kind of reward.
If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that starting a community means accepting that it will one day outgrow your control, your recognition, and even your presence. You build it, nurture it, and then, if you’re lucky, it learns to live without you.
That’s the work: the quiet, often thankless labor of creating something that can stand on its own. The satisfaction has to come not from credit, but from continuity. From knowing that what you built still connects people, even if they’ll never know you were part of its foundation.
When I think about it now, I’m not sure I’d call it a tragedy, but it isn’t exactly comforting either. There’s something sharp about realizing that a space you helped build no longer has any trace of you in it. The story kept going, yes, but it did so by forgetting who helped start it.
That’s the quiet heartbreak of community work. You give pieces of yourself to build something lasting, and when it finally stands on its own, it does so with your name scraped off the foundation. You want it to thrive. Of course you do! But you also want to be remembered as someone who mattered.
And maybe both things can be true. Maybe the work succeeded, and it still hurts. Maybe that’s what legacy really feels like; not pride, but absence. The hollow space left behind when the thing you loved most no longer needs you to exist.
So yes, starting a community is thankless. It’s draining, humbling, and sometimes it breaks your heart. But the ache is proof that you cared enough to build something real. And even if no one remembers your part in it, the echoes of that care still shape the walls.
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