Fillos de Galicia

» see fillos.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 1997 i was not online yet. The modem at home arrived the following year, and the first thing it connected to was Turkish. Fillos de Galicia was already running by then, doing the same job in a language with about two and a half million speakers, for an audience defined by the fact that it had left home.

Galicia exports people. It has done so for a century and a half, to Buenos Aires and Havana first and to Switzerland later, and the word for the children of those emigrants is in the name: fillos, sons and daughters. Manuel Casal Lodeiro built the site in 1997 as a virtual community for them, in Galician rather than Spanish, and it predates every social network it would later be compared to. The front page still carries the tagline, in Galician: the first and largest social network of the Galician world nation.

It was run as a registered cultural association, which is a different thing from a startup and a different thing from a hobby page. There were assemblies and a board elected at them, plus the paperwork that comes with both. The site carried forums and a blog farm for members, and when the Galician blog host Blogaliza closed in 2018 those blogs came back to fillos.org rather than disappearing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the slow years ~

Nothing dramatic killed it. The association ran out of money for hosting, and from 2018 another Galician non-profit, Asociación Touda, carried the servers and renewed the domains for free. Then it ran out of the other thing, which is people willing to call a meeting. The announcement gives the cause as "varios anos de inactividade", several years of inactivity, and names nothing else.

~ the vote ~

The members' assembly concluded on 28 July 2025 with a unanimous decision to dissolve the association, and the dissolution was then filed with the national register of associations so that the body legally stopped existing. The board published the notice on its own site on 29 November 2025, under a headline that translates as "Fillos de Galicia officially ceases to exist", and thanked the hundreds of members and volunteers who had passed through in twenty-eight years.

~ the handover ~

Touda took the domains and the sites into a service it calls LegadoWeb, built for exactly this situation: an organization stops, and somebody still has to answer for the DNS of content that has historical value. So fillos.org still serves. The forums are frozen and the last blog post is the farewell, while the association that owned all of it no longer exists in any register. A community site outliving its own legal entity by somebody else's goodwill is a better outcome than most of the graves on this site get.

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