Comment by cjdell
1 month ago
Joining a hackspace/makerspace suddenly introduced me to a high quality real-life social network. It's an excuse to engage with your hobbies but also hangout with like minds and pick up new skills.
This won't be an option for everyone. I have to travel for an hour each way to get to mine, but it's worth it. If I had more energy I would start one in the city where I live.
A different take: joining one of these spaces (in the bay area) has exposed me to a weird and unpleasant underbelly of society that I barely knew existed. It's like the worst of Reddit, but in real life. People who want you to work on their projects "for the exposure," crypto scammers and people who are very naive and enthusiastic about crypto, depressed unemployable people, people who secretly live on the lobby couches, elderly people just watching videos all day, get-rich-quick people, people who are always "starting to learn" for years at a time, it's quite an array.
Maker spaces declined over time. When I first started going to TechShop, it was people making nozzles for X-Prize rockets, Stanford grad students who needed better machine tools, Burning Man people making props, steampunks making props, and very serious model railroaders making model locomotives. Four milling machines in use all the time, CNC mills, plasma cutters, water jet cutters - heavy equipment. All the usual woodworking stuff. A paint shop with proper ventilation. Autodesk Inventor on all the computers. Lots of very smart people with interesting skill sets. The serious maker spaces were descended from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.[1]
By the time the maker movement collapsed, it was people grinding out crap to sell on Etsy, "hand made" on a CNC laser cutter. High school students doing the maker thing to get it on their college resume. Printing trinkets with a 3D printer. Classes for teenagers where everybody built kits. Arts and crafts at the advanced kindergarten paper folding level.
[1] https://cba.mit.edu/
Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.
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I miss the maker space era. I was at TechShop for most of the years it existed.
I'm glad Hackspace culture is still very much alive in the UK. It feels like people are starting to become interested in such things again. I'm hoping the growing right-to-repair/modify movement will steer more people in this direction.
https://www.hackspace.org.uk/
There's several here in cold north as well, but they're kind of hit by the population density problem. Only the few biggest cities have a lot of activity.
It's kind of funny to note that the negative comments here are ones calling it the Make (tm)(R) Magazine spaces and the positives are hackerspaces, as the real ones are.