Ask HN: What happened to hackerspaces?

I was a member, and followed the bankruptcy. All I lost in the bankruptcy was about two weeks of paid membership. Mostly, their costs came from rent. They had some nice high-visibility locations. Those were expensive. They exaggerated revenue to borrow money to open more locations, like many tech startups.[1] The bankruptcy did show some high travel costs, but since they had 10 locations spread over the US, that's not unreasonable.

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...

The one in my town shifted focus from hackerspace to Antifa-adjacent sex club.

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.

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I like what those guys are doing, but frankly its simply to far away at this point for me to justify the once or twice a year I might want to use a lathe/mill. Partially because I tend to have my own "hacker space" in my house given the last couple decades of acquiring tools.

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'm involved in the Singapore hackerspace.

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.