Ask HN: What happened to hackerspaces?
I remember when hackerspaces were in every major city, and quite a few medium sized cities also had them.
Now, most are gone, for various reasons.
What gives?
Now, most are gone, for various reasons.
What gives?
Over the past 15 years or so, property prices have soared in so many cities. It really makes it hard to afford space for quirky things. There are certainly plenty of examples of ones that still exist and enough determination and you can still make things happen, but I think the rising cost of real estate is putting a damper on things like this.
The first hack group I fell in with (2600) met in a restaurant, and it worked and evolved into other groups including a hackerspace.
Most hackerspaces I've been a part of couldn't or barely could afford their rent. Memberships were already too expensive, and they were constantly just getting squeezed between membership revenue and hard costs. Ultimately it doesn't add up.
I think a lot of what used to happen at makerspaces has transitioned to libraries. Lots of libraries have 3d printers, et. Now, are free, and don't have the problem with affording space.
It lagged behind the library of the next town over, but is now comparable.
From their website, looks like they're doing quite well!
(for those who remember a previous incarnation of the space, with my partner and some friends we painted the 2 Dinos mural)
Hacker Dojo, as mentioned elsewhere, pivoted to something sort of like WeWork. $150/month. Mostly people slaving away at laptops, pre-COVID.
Maker Nexus seems from their web site to be doing OK. Pre-COVID, they were mostly sewing and kids classes, but now they seem to have more heavy metal tools. $150/month.
Humanmade, in SF, has government support, and is more oriented to training for trades. They ended up with much of TechShop's equipment. $250/month.
There's also the woke shop, Double Union.
What killed TechShop was that the gym model doesn't work for maker spaces. Gyms work because people pay but don't show up that much. Maker spaces get people whose day job is to be there making stuff.
Unfortunately Hacker Dojo daytime attendance nowadays is quite low, so they're not really attracting people as a WeWork space. I wonder how they're going to pick it back up.
The gym-type business model of pay by the month and get all the tool time you can use, just did not work out.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2017/11/15/techsho...
https://circuitlaunch.com/ (working hard to brand away from /makerspace/ or /hackerspace/, but serving a similar audience and purpose, in a professional/entrepreneur/business-building direction).
It's not all bad. In my city it seems the hacker spaces organized by individuals were replaced by maker spaces funded and organized by the city. At least two that I know of, that are now basically free co-working spaces with 3D printers, meeting rooms, free wifi and such.
One is run by the agency that ran the ccTLD back in the early 2000s, called Goto10 in Malmö and Stockholm. Very nice space to work at.
The other is run by the city of Malmö called Stapeln and is in a basement.
Besides those I know of at least two hacker spaces run by individuals that were still going last I checked.
The pandemic hit them pretty hard of course.
The better way for a city to help is let the local library system manage the relationship or itself be the steward of the space.
My local library system offers a limited “makerspace” program[0] that does some of this stuff within the library, but I think something that should be more integrated is their Library of Things[1] program which allows patrons to take home all sorts of tools and equipment that are just not used very often.
I think more library systems should be granted the freedom and funding by their governing bodies to create a makerspace.
Footnote: The other option I didn’t address was to have schools/universities maintain them, but those are always reserved for student and faculty.
[0]: https://www.saclibrary.org/Education/Tech-Creation/Makerspac...
[1]: https://www.saclibrary.org/Books-Media/Specialty-Checkouts/L...
Unfortunately I think hackerspace on gov property are doomed to never be cool.
The label of hackerspace should really be earned and the spaces that fall into that 10% group demonstrate specific ethos, robust community engagement, and as a result can operate independently.
A makerspace is just a place where you make stuff in and can have or gain some level of access to tools and equipment. It is certainly not as cool as a hackerspace, but its very presence is the prototype for one.
Stapeln was organized by the city.
But all hacker spaces here can get grants from the government.
When I was involved with one, now defunct, we received teaching grants from the state. Anyone who holds workshops or educational gatherings can apply for these grants.
St. Louis: https://archreactor.org/
Pittsburgh: https://hackpgh.org/
Boston (albeit bummed they left their Somverville location): https://www.artisansasylum.com/
Many undergraduate-focused higher ed institutions have copied the makerspace/hackerspace model, primarily as an amenity for students. These are, in some cases, clopen to the public (sic). Public libraries have also copied the model.
Reviewing the data, AFAICT:
1. The hackerspace-as-business model largely didn't work.
2. The community-run 501(c)3 model remains viable in mid-sized cities.
3. Organizations like hacker spaces have a really hard time of it in larger cities, mostly because of rent.
4. In places that are too rural or too expensive to support hackerspaces, other institutions often provide partial solutions which are not hackerspaces per se but offer similar amenities.
Given that the primary barrier seems to be real estate, I am honestly mildly surprised that major donor hasn't tried to seed a legacy by copying the Carnegie Library formula but for hackerspaces. Seems like a much better legacy-building project than adding an extra half bajillion to a university endowment or starting yet another charter school experiment.
- TechShop and it's fall - I remember one person arguing hackerspaces may be better run as a nonprofit model.
- The rise of small-scale maker capabilities within public institutions like libraries. I considered signing up for a maker space last year and it made more sense to pay for a second library that happened to have a good maker lab.
- The rise of cheaper or more accessible prototype manufacturing (e.g. pcbway , sendcutsend, etc.).
- The other threads trying to save spaces, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245086 (2022)
* Prusa 3D Printer
* Hic Top CR-10 3D Printer
* Ender-3 S1 Pro 3D Printer
* Brother ScanNCut
* Silhouette CAMEO
* Silhouette Vinyl Cutter
* EverSewn Sparrow X2 Embroidery Machine
* Brother PE900 Embroidery Machine
* Carvey CNC Desktop Fabricator
* Glowforge Laser Cutter
* Sawgrass Sublimation Printer
It also has a lot of audio recording equipment with soundbooths, and a bunch of lighting and photography/video equipment.
I have a Prusa Mk3S+ with MMU, head improvement, and Bear kit.
Also have maybe 40 rolls of filament from glow in the dark, UV reactive, and more or less every color and an Octoprint with cameras and a power shutoff.
The only problem is my electronics lab is 60 Hz equipment. ]:
https://www.americancommunities.org/who-owns-a-passport-in-a....
Part of the reason we bought a house here is because it was close to some nicer suburbs without being terribly expensive itself (our home was just reappraised and it was determined to still be under the average existing house sales price in the US of $410k, even though it went up like 40% since last time).
We can drive twenty minutes and go to the same nice stores and restaurants that people living there can, if we wanted to.
I'm aware our local library is an outlier. There are other libraries in the area, including in that wealthy neighboring city, that don't have anywhere near as much equipment.
That's my limited anecdotal experience, noticing there's also been libraries that might've initially offered 3d printing then stopped (possibly due to abuse, maintenance burden, staff changes, etc.)
If municipality governments had any common sense, they would find ways to manage the risks and benefits of opening fix-it and make community centers.
One of my favorite spaces (though distant from where I live) - Metrix Create:Space - shut down down in 2018 in part because people didn't have as much of a reason to show up [1]
[1] https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2018/08/tech-junkies-and-...
The two big reasons I and my friends don't run them anymore: rent costs and COVID.
Hackerspaces require ongoing work and support. They aren't great businesses, but are great community spaces. To that end, you need an ongoing commitment of people to provide their time, resources, and effort.
We are extremely lucky in Ballarat that we have such a group of committed members, as well as very generous sponsorship. We've paid that back through ongoing community involvement and releasing many free resources, but we are lucky to be in that position.
Australia in general seems to have decent Hackerspaces in all the major cities, sometimes multiple, as well as good growing support from the Library network with their own makerspaces (including regular workshops for 3D printing etc).
Plus makerspaces were just difficult to make viable and really you are probably better off spending that time on any other endeavor.
A group of us out here tried starting one in West Michigan and it sputtered along for a while. Financials and interest were never able to balance out. The Geek Group out here did a little "better" but the owners and volunteers there basically burned themselves out constantly. Then the founder got nailed for bitcoin crimes and that was the end.
Now that things have reopened they simply never brought it back.
I feel like I read a story about running one in the Bay that was just about having to deal with crustpunks and people having sex in the machine rooms.
Although I think libraries have equipment like 3D printers these days.
I'm looking for a 3000+ sq ft single-story house and workshop on cheap land without natural hazards within 15-20 minutes of somewhere with a Trader Joe's.
Every major European city I visit has its own, or multiple, nice hackerspaces. Often smaller cities as well. Most/many of them are coming out of the pandemic more enthusiastically than before.
Just the city I live in (Munich) has at least three community-oriented hackerspaces/makerspaces, and a bunch more 'open workshops' and commercial spots.
Here's a list of _just_ Chaos Computer Club chapters around Germany: https://www.ccc.de/de/club/erfas
Another challenge is governance. Managing a volunteer organisation can be tricky, especially if a few get paid for various things. Passionate people burn out and leave. That leaves a management vacuum that is easily exploited by people with an agenda. I watched one shop get completely taken over by political issues and the original mission was left behind for identity focus. It was a real bummer.
The only ones that seem to survive have a strong professional management core and strict monetary oversight.
Many comments here confirm this attitude, where what they see in spaces is reduced to "shared access to tools". Nobody wants to put in the effort just to have the majority be leeches.
It should not be a surprise that some people prefer to not deal with the idea of hackerspace-as-community and seek their community elsewhere.
Oh, didn’t realize I was watching Fox & Friends.
There are many! Also, more importantly, other institutions have taken up ideas from them and offer tools and services to address the same needs. Libraries and colleges in many communities host makerspace tools, tool libraries
The maker movement has taken off, Etsy, home crafting, and sharing and selling projects at all varient of levels of polish,
Finding like-minded individuals, for all manner of interests, is possible through meetups.
I suppose, they've unbundled. I would say: look closer, they're maybe more present than ever, but in parts, and adapted in ways that best complement the psychological demographics of the places they serve.
[1]: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces [2]: https://noisebridge.net/
Humans are only so charitable. At some point the cost of fixing what is broken in a hacker space is contrasted against a car repair (or something) and the hacker space looses.
This is compounded by the fact that the people who can responsibly use a hacker space usually own the tools or can get them cheap. Those who really want the hacker space have no clue that their incorrect use of the tool will destroy it.
I am amazed that any publicly available hacker spaces survived the first week.
I ran a hacker space in a school at my last employer. They never had a clue how much time and money went into the hacker space. When I left they asked if I wanted the stuff. They could not understand that two weeks after I left it was all broken, and had no value.
Basically, the politics of the situation is impossible. Maintaining a space like that costs an incredible amount of money and time. You'd hope that the community could pitch in together, but you always end up with a single person being the primary patron, spending their own time and money, while others abuse the space and the machines for themselves.
The only spaces that seem to have survived are ones that gets large grants from some institution like a university or local government, and therefore can be run like a business, with leadership and staffing.
I currently serve as vice-chair of the board. I joined right before COVID and my focus has been helping get policies and processes in place to continue to help us scale. We've seen pretty rapid growth post COVID and are seeing ~10 new members a month.
Happy to answer any questions (when I wake up).
Be sure to stop and say hi If you're ever in Denver, CO!
But as others said, libraries can also fulfill the same function. I went to Zwolle recently and saw that they even seem to have a regular volunteer repair cafe. Thought that was super cool
The most sustainable models I've seen have these features:
- Access to the physical space is free for non-members only during restricted time periods
- A small monthly membership fee is required to access the space during other hours
- Mandatory training is required for any complex/expensive equipment (laser cutters, 3d printers, welding equipment)
As someone who spent many years as a volunteer at a couple spaces, there were a lot of lonely nights of nobody showing up. Getting adults off the couch and out for an evening of nerding out with free access to laser cutters, 3D printers, and well equipped electronics workstations is more challenging than one would imagine.
But, what I think we need to do in Austin is figure out how to get the local school districts to open up the high school machine shops, electronics labs/etc on weekends/whatever. I've seen the insides of Anderson High, and more recently Vandegrift, and both of them have tooling that far exceeds what most hackerspaces can only dream about. They don't have much in the way of pictures of their lab space but there is one on this page https://www.viperbots.org/home of the cleanest lathe you will every see and in the background one if their vertical mills and another picture of a tormach 1100 MX (a ~$40k mill).Plus at least for 3 months out of the year the lockers/etc are basically vacant and there is a few thousand square feet of light industrial workspace along with electronics labs full of scopes, power supplies and soldering stations. Piles of 3d printers, and unlike libraries the noise of a big milling machine isn't going to be heard in the quiet spaces in the library.
So, there are natural hacker spaces all over town if one can figure out how to protect the tools from random idiots and convince the school districts that they can get more mentors/etc, and maybe even raise some revenue if people are willing to pay for access.
PS: In a state that tends to underfund their teachers its amazing how much money a FIRST robotics program can get from industry in the wealthy parts of town when the sponsorships are $5k-10k. Of course its peanuts compared with the football program in many cases. Ex that high schools stadium https://texasbob.com/stadium/stadium.php?id=1312
I think in general it only works if there is a strong community / third place thing going. I always saw that as their biggest offering--a way to get out of the house without drinking or spending money. The making / hacking thing is just something to enjoy together.
COVID was a big drag but we clamped down on expenses and had built up a nest egg in case of emergencies so the financial hit didn't do us in. It really wiped out a lot of the social aspects of the community and we're still struggling to get those back.
Rent hurts but we were lucky to lock in a long-term contract with a fixed annual percentage increase. It's still by far our biggest expense.
My opinion and experience is that a makerspace / hackerspace can only succeed with at least one person that's nearly 100% dedicated to running it, mostly without pay. The founder(s) probably have 5-7 years before they totally burn out so unless they've found and built up some others that are just as dedicated, it's hard to sustain a space.
I think our main problem was that once we had a comfortable core base of members a few years ago, we stopped recruiting more because some of us were afraid that bad people would join as members and none of us would have good enough reasons to kick them out.
When the pandemic hit, some of our members moved on with their lives — they moved back overseas, got married, bought their own places, etc. That caused our membership revenue to take quite a hit.
We made the mistake of moving during the pandemic because we thought that we could save on rent, but the new place turned out to be highly unpopular among those that didn't speak up (it was bigger and cheaper, but there were more flights of stairs to climb). More people left.
Newcomers tend to have a very transactional view of the space. Some people and groups continue to exploit the space because it's "cheap". A bunch seem to be quite happy to pay their membership dues and leave a mess after they're done, because some of the rooms don't get used very much, and enough time passes in between so we don't really know who we need to give behavioural feedback to. We've had people use the space as a hostel because they "tend to work late at night", and an "open source" group thinking that they could share access credentials among their own members because they paid slightly more than a usual membership subscription for one single month (we don't have a group membership tier).
Not enough people want to take long-term ownership over the space now — many think that a hackerspace director is also the space manager, and the person that's always around to fix things up and clean up messes. Creating a culture where members are ideally empowered to take charge of the environment is difficult.
I guess the overarching problem is that it's hard to get an active community going again without critical mass, and expect a bunch of newcomers to contribute significant amounts of ownership and money towards maintaining the space.
Cheap commercial real estate is really hard to find. It's no longer viable to get a little warehouse on the edge of town and turn it into something cool.
Tech shop tried this coworking model on a makerspace, and we known how it turned out. While it had some internal problems (from what I’m aware), it was never going to be sustainable because, at the prices they were charging, those who could afford it could usually afford some sort of desktop version of what they used tech shop for, except for maybe the water jet and plasma cutters. It was a self service machine shop that required you to invest your time in training to be able to even utilize, and no real community experience to speak of. It became a lot of people doing professional work, a few hours of machine time each per week, and they would go home.
But all this is to say that a makerspace (nor a coworking space for that matter) is a hackerspace automatically, that titled is earned. The point at which a shared space like this becomes a hackerspace is the point where it becomes “cool”, where the community has reached critical mass, events and meetups can happen periodically, and it becomes a hub for the community.
Most hackerspaces that went under recently will have claimed it was because the pandemic and lockdowns, but those events were merely the catalyst to their demise. A lot of people in this thread posit that the community is nice or at least important, I disagree.
The hackerspace is the community.
Hackerspaces that could not keep up with rapid community attrition during the pandemic post-lockdown were left them resource-constrained, unable to keep up with financial commitments. Most in this position chose to close. The community (more specifically the community members’ network) provides the stability as nearly all opportunities, grants, donations, and other contributions originate from people who built or are active participants in the community. An actively shrinking community effectively lobotomizes the hackerspace, leaving nothing more than an empty shell.
Coworking spaces are for those who want to play office (WeWork, HackerDojo)
Makerspaces are glorified tool shares (TechShop)
A true hackerspace is a community space for those who are curious, creative, and passionate about doing things just because they think it’s interesting or cool.
I do wish there was more of them though.
If you can't find the kind you're looking for, you can make one!
The core founders who put in all the work to keep the space going either got squeezed out, got jobs and social obligations, or straight up died.
The LUGs I have been to are mostly social groups running off the inertia of old members which were around back when LUGs were relevant, an inertia which is slowing down with the age of the members.
I served on the board for a local LUG and there is still some interest from the community but not like back in the day when they could pull 100s of people in a meeting and IBM or Redhat would buy free pizza for everyone in the early 2000s.
At the same time that Windows was making inroads, Java, Apple, and Android have made significant inroads in their own ways.
Overall, linux has become more user friendly (reducing the learning curve); training has become common, and multiple companies have become more competitive with Linux. This has reduced the demand for less structured training of LUGs.
Real estate is expensive and a makerspace should be near public transport (which will likely be closer to the city center) but should be able to to facilitate some parking and/or transfer of large items to/from a vehicle. Cheap real estate does come in varieties that support the above.
Most makerspaces carelessly target people to pay membership and nothing else. This creates a membership base that primarily goes to the space for their projects and goes home. This kind of member will drop the membership the moment they realize they can just buy the one or two machines they need and keep it at home (see techshop). This becomes a treadmill very quickly. Makerspaces need to focus on building a community of people who have the tools at home and choose to work there because is a great place to collaborate, but the problem here is that those people don’t have a ton of disposable income (or at least reliably recurring income) to spend on a membership. Leadership needs to balance the financial sustainability motive with the community sustainability one.
A makerspace staring up needs:
* to be a nonprofit
* good value for rent
* one to two years of runway in the bank
* founding members who can work from the makerspace
* a set of tools that are more difficult to have at home
* night events that happen several times per week
Basically, you need a lot of money, patience, and City buy-in helps a lot. Municipalities should be lining up to give money to people who want to manage theses sorts of community spaces, they are innovation and educational centers that can create an absurd amount of value for the relatively small investment. Usually it’s difficult to fill a community space with smart, competent people who actually want to help instead of grifters, sales people, and those who lack curiosity.
The best experiences feel like an eternal September, and the bad ones just feel like accelerated enshitification. How do you attract people that want to spend their time being part of a community and dissuade those who are looking to only consume resources? I think a lot of spaces fail because they rely too much on paying members who never become part of the community and will drop the expensive subscription when it becomes convenient for them to do so.
My vision for a makerspace is one where anyone can use it for free, you can become a member for some money, and those we want to stick around, we pay a small amount to stay. Using tools that are relatively safe should be mostly self certification. Tools that’s cause injuries or are expensive should require training or you should just send a job in (CNC mill). The actual real estate needs to be held by a trust and should be available to the makerspace as long as they are active.
If I have the tools at home, why would I commute to the makerspace to work? This seems like the remote work thing, only amplified (because I’m probably not commuting to do 8 hours of work on my project, now I’m paying instead of being paid, and I have to drag my project and raw materials with me [with the risk of damage and PITA that entails]).
If RTOffice isn’t desirable, why is RTMakerspace going to be popular?
Those who have personal or company access to the tools they need and are satisfied with that are not the ones that do not benefit from makerspaces, and makerspaces do not benefit (in the long term) from a bunch of businesses booking our huge blocks of hours of machine time only for them to go home immediately once everything is done.
A makerspace should be a social and creative space with access to tools. A makerspace as a community space is successful when people want to be there.