alt Hacker News> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects.
> The ability to make things at home is disappearing
I do not know what you are talking about.
3D printing at home is more popular than ever. Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
> People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines
I think this is an appeal to 3D printing purity that drove me away from many of the communities. In the early days we all swapped tips and shared reviews of parts (like the Smoothieboard I still have) with other people who liked to build machines because that was the only way to do 3D printing at hobby level prices. When asked what we used the 3D printers for, the joke was that they were used to print parts for our 3D printer. It wasn’t really a joke, though. We spent more time keeping the printers working and trying to tune them than we did printing other things we needed.
That has flipped. Now it’s easy to get a cheap 3D printer and start getting parts out of it without thinking about the printer much. This is great if you’re a person who wants to use the output of the printer. This is boring if you think the value is the process of building and changing the printer hardware all the time.
I’m tired of hearing takes about how this is wrong or bad. Most “makers” want to make other things, not spend their precious free time trying to debug failing prints. There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap. People who want to do that can, but don’t look down upon the people who don’t want to do that.
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We had a similar discussion about computers the other day. A lot of us miss the days of tiny memory and optimizing for that.
It takes all kinds and I see no reason to gate keep either way. It's too bad that we do t often segregate around those opinions and don't share as much
> There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap.
And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
Between the American tariffs and Chinese prioritization of 3d printing in a past five year plan American hobbyists and small scale producers are in a potential bind.
> I do not know what you are talking about.
What are you talking about? Show me one survey that shows DIY crafts as a whole becoming more popular in the past several decades. It's just not a thing. People increasingly don't have room for it, computers and cell phones have won as a way to spend the bulk of our free time, and even if you want to create, the primary outlet is the digital world.
> 3D printing at home is more popular than ever
Sure, but that's a given because the technology didn't exist until very recently. I can also say that Tesla Cybertruck is more popular than ever, but that doesn't mean much, right.
> Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
A vanishingly tiny proportion of families in the US or in the EU own 3D printers and use them.