This heavily depends on your audience and where you are located. In my experience it has always been mostly to get people to be present consistently: Without constant effort a lot of the regulars can occasionally just drop away for a few weeks and if you don't have a huge amount of people that will dampen the social aspect a lot.

I was looking into local hackerspaces the other day, and was surprised to see that one of the best-looking ones communicates this concern about "Presence": https://wiki.artisansasylum.com/index.php/Membership_Agreeme...

Sadly this sort of thing wouldn't work where I am, it's almost entirely a list of veiled threats and those are not generally abided culturally. The hacker community is if anything even worse at it.

If it does work I imagine this is one way to solve the problem.

Noisebridge seems to do a decent job of keeping tools available and impressing on people that it's not their stuff. I'm constantly surprised by the quality and functionality of what they have.

Keeping tools highly available and having 'elders' ensuring they are used well and respected was my observation.

Noisebridge are true believers in the democratisation of tools - they have workshops and collaborations have at every level of expertise - it is an awesome social good.

Guests were thankful for the knowledge gained and things mostly worked out.

Yeah, we’ll said. I’ve been thinking of teaching some beginner electronics classes there.

Maybe buy-your-own-tools hackerspaces are the way forward. This would also generate revenue and presumably facilitate the mushrooming of new hackerspaces.