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About the KBD magazine
The Keyboard Builders' Digest is a weekly selection of the best DIY keyboard related posts, mostly from related subs of Reddit – r/mk minus memes, cats, consumerism and ignorant questions.
It all started out as a Covid lockdown project to neatly arrange my bookmarks and went somehow out of hand with 1800+ subscribers from all over the world.
Why?
Well, a few years ago, r/mk (and of course GH, Deskthority and various online resources) made it possible to build my custom keyboard from scratch, without any background in electronics or firmware programming. I will be always grateful for that.
However, when I was finally content with my build, I stopped visiting r/mk for months (summer of 2020).
Checking back after this hiatus I had to realize that the sub turned into something totally different in the meantime. As it went from 200k members to 800k in only two years, it became a hard-to-follow platform flooded by spam.
Due to the influx of mostly young kids, gamers and in general consumers rather than builders, the sub is now flooded by low effort posts, cheap memes and general showing off. The DIY aspect of the hobby is way underrepresented.
Nevertheless, I kept bookmarking valuable content occasionally and thought it were useful to post them as a snapshot of the best of r/mk - without the annoying and distracting stuff.
What's in the magazine?
I try to focus on posts with the potential to teach you something. Projects with source files, build logs, photologs or at least some useful details on the build.
Promoting building instead of hoarding. Creativity instead of consumerism.
- No memes,
- No karma-whoring (cats/pets/kids, half-naked selfies, expensive props),
- No showing off and self-promotion (WPM, unopened boxes, etc.),
- No promotion of hoarding (group buys, interest checks, ads) – well, MoErgo is a supporter so...,
- No low effort posts.
To characterize my filters: less than 1% of the posts make it to the digest on average.
When?
New issues are published every Monday [that's not true anymore].
Consider subscribing (free) to never miss an issue.
(I won't spam you, I promise. The newsletter was a reader request and it's only for the weekly reminders.)
How can you help?
I'm not sure how long will I be able to do this project because compiling the weekly digests requires a lot of my time and effort.
However, if you'd like to see more of this, you can buy me a coffee (or rather keyswitch) to boost my commitment.
Additionally, an upvote on the weekly r/mk posts may help to reach more people and promote the great projects featured in the magazine.
And of course I appreciate every feedback, mostly on Reddit.
Thanks for reading!
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Behind the scenes of issue 14