This article focuses on mechanisms to handle inequality among participants in claimed participatory spaces. An ethnographic study of the Occupy Sandy network after Hurricane Sandy in New York City shows how activists worked with socio-economically marginalised communities with the aim of empowering them. Yet, the compensatory mechanisms put in place to counteract inequality brought about three problems of differentiation. These were: variation in individual agency, the difficulty of intersectional positions and situated marginalisation beyond commonly acknowledged identity markers.