Two things happened to the No Gods No Masters network this summer, seven weeks apart, and they belong in the same story.

What they built

In June, after two years of work, the collective completed the final stages of migrating every site off commercial data centers — OVH, Ionos, Linode — onto infrastructure they own outright:

  • 10 high-performance servers, 114 cores / 182 threads
  • Full 40U rack, 10-Gigabit fiber
  • 200 TB HDD + 25 TB NVMe
  • Dedicated AI server (RTX 5080)
  • Battery backup, renewable energy
  • Stack: Linux, Proxmox, FreeBSD, pfSense — nothing proprietary

Total investment: over $40,000, the largest infrastructure commitment the cooperative has ever made. The migration order is the part worth copying: they went slow — 70% of sites first, stability-tested over months — and moved the highest-traffic properties last, once the platform had proven itself on everything that didn't matter as much.

They also published the hardware list and the cost. That is rarer than it should be. Communities debating their own build almost never have a real bill of materials from a real project of comparable shape — the financing math is always the hard part, and $40,000 over two years with a ten-server end state is a concrete anchor for anyone pricing the same path. Not every community needs (or can afford) this tier; most should start smaller. But the top rung of the ladder now has a published price, and that makes every rung below it easier to estimate honestly.

Their stated reason: "Digital autonomy cannot exist if the hardware, networks, and facilities we depend on are owned by someone else." Whether or not you share the politics, the engineering claim is testable, and what happened next tested it.

The demand that went around the data center

On July 9, Cloudflare notified the collective that the FBI had obtained a court order compelling disclosure of records relating to the collective's Cloudflare account — the account used to manage DNS and reverse-proxying for AnarchistFederation.net. Cloudflare had been legally prohibited from telling them: the request came with a nondisclosure order, and the notification arrived only once the NDO expired. The collective published the notice on July 14.

Now the part that should interest anyone who runs infrastructure for a community:

What the demand could reach: Cloudflare held account records and administrative information, and the location of the collective's Netherlands reverse proxy. That is all.

What it could not reach: the servers, the databases, the forums, the email systems, the content. Those live in the collective's own micro data center, physically under their control. No seizure, no search, no access — and no mechanism by which there could have been, because the order was served on a third party that doesn't operate the hardware.

The design that produced this outcome is documented in the same notice: origin servers hidden behind multiple reverse proxies (Iceland, Moldova, Netherlands) before traffic ever reaches self-hosted infrastructure. The FBI's order landed on the outermost, rented layer — and bounced off the layer that matters, because the layer that matters is owned.

The honest wrinkle

Here is the part that makes this a case study instead of a victory lap: the fiercely independent collective still runs Cloudflare. DNS and reverse proxying — the most exposed layer of the whole stack, the layer every request touches first — is rented from a US company that can be compelled, and was compelled, under a gag order nobody could see.

That is not hypocrisy. It is the actual shape of the problem. Every organization, no matter how sovereign its hardware, rents something — DNS, a relay, a CDN, a transit provider — and every rented layer is someone else's subpoena surface. You do not get to zero by buying servers. You get to zero by knowing, precisely, which layers you rent, what each of them holds, and what a court order against each of them would yield. NGNM could answer that question within a day because they had already done the inventory, deliberately, when they designed the reverse-proxy chain: Cloudflare holds account metadata and proxy topology, and nothing else, because everything else was pulled in-house.

Most organizations cannot answer that question. Their records are spread across providers they picked by convenience years ago, and the first notice of what a demand against any of them would yield arrives when the demand does.

The transparency notice is part of the infrastructure

The second thing worth copying is not the rack — it's the July 14 post.

When the NDO expired, the collective published what happened: who requested what, against which provider, what could and could not be disclosed, and what they don't know. Compare that to the transparency reports most providers issue — periodic, aggregate, published on the provider's schedule in the provider's format. An event-driven, own-voice notice after a specific demand is a different instrument. It is the difference between "we receive requests, some percentage we comply with" and "on July 9 we learned this specific thing was requested, here is what it touched."

Communities that host others — and any co-op, fire hall, or small business running shared services is in that business — should write the template before they need it: which provider notices we commit to republish, what we will say about scope, who signs it. The commitment costs nothing on the day you write it and everything on the day you need it. NGNM's notice works because it is precise about the boundary between known and unknown: they state plainly that they cannot know whether the Cloudflare demand connects to anything else, and they decline to speculate. Publishing what you can verify and marking what you can't is what makes the document credible rather than theatrical.

What To Do

  1. Inventory your rented layers. DNS, reverse proxy/CDN, email relay, backup target, registrar. For each: what does it hold, and what would a court order against it yield? If the answer to the second question is "I don't know," that is the finding.
  2. Decide what to pull in-house — starting with anything that holds content or credentials, which is where NGNM's design concentrated ownership.
  3. Pre-write the transparency notice. Template, trigger, signatory. The NDO will silence you when it matters; the commitment is what you do the day it expires.
  4. If you own hardware, publish the bill of materials. NGNM's $40K spec sheet does more for the community-infrastructure argument than any amount of advocacy, because it lets the next community price the decision before voting on it.

Ownership didn't make NGNM immune to law enforcement. It made the law enforcement request small — metadata and a proxy location instead of everything — and made the disclosure theirs to publish. That is what control buys. Not safety from demands; a shape of infrastructure where demands land somewhere you chose, and the telling is yours to do.

Sources: No Gods No Masters — Migrating To Our Own Anarchist Data Center, June 22, 2026; No Gods No Masters — Transparency Notice: FBI Court Order Relating to AnarchistFederation.net, July 14, 2026.