Yes, it's an unusually disfunctional hacker space.

I'm sure not every town has that kind of facilities, but if you haven't actually checked yet, please do. Libraries are awesome and often overlooked.

Alternative idea: Some cafes that close in the afternoon are happy to open as a meeting space in the evening at not-terrible prices.

If the point is for it to be used as a hacker space, and it isn't being used as such, are they interested in focusing it on that?

Ours (Leighhack) is small in membership but moderately wide. We have textiles, fabrication (3d print & CNC), electronics, woodworking and infra/security in pretty constant flow. We're just finishing building a darkroom.

Yesterday was two members sewing (one dress, one stage props), one member restoring an old Mac and cutting on the CNC (me), one designing and printing a flower pot for a monitored garden. And that's what I know of.

We've just finished up a six week sewing course, and we're looking to courses on 3d design and printing and I believe woodturning.

Different hack(er)spaces have different priorities, dependant on the members and community it serves.

Regarding your position, you need to assume what it is and try to stay positive about finding what you want to get, based on what you said, other people work on projects that don't require a permanent effort, and are not going to finish well, the kind of initiatives I think you're not interested in. If that feeling of being out of context continues it's better you leave or low your expectations. I assisted a couple of times to one of those places and never felt the motivation to being part of that. I think it's most effective when you go with a group of people already created

Set rules that kick out anyone who is not building something or learning to build something.

Every time I visit, there's a crowd of people from high school students to retirees building stuff and most of them are happy/excited to tell you all about their new project.

Despite 5 Prusa, 1 Formlabs SLA and 1 SLS, you usually have to make an appointment or wait for you chance at printing. The laser cutter and CNC are mostly idle, though.

The talks that others offered were postmortems about building something and one guy gave a lecture on how he patented and commercialised his own milk frother design. Another project was CNCing the clips for leather bicycle luggage bags. After a while, the regulars added a really nice café corner so that you can comfortably gossip a bit away from all the machine noise.

I frequented CCCB in Berlin for some time, but I didn't find the experience unpleasant for a number of reasons:

1. is more like an office space where people go to work and are not so inclined to speak with you;

2. apartheid exists there: if you aren't a member you have no access to the "hackerspace", that in truth is very small. If you are lucky, you become friend of a member and you gain access to that place, but often , because it's near to the "relax area" you have to ask the permission to literally everyone to use a drill or other instruments producing noise, plus the place is considered some kind of "secret cave" for members so they have little tolerance for your presence even if you went there for months;

3. They don't like new members, they do they can to discourage you to became one. The process is based on the endorsement of senior members that you can't meet , in matter of fact, because they rarely frequent the area open to not members plus , this is my impression they are a little bit snob ...

So at the and I was tired of that place , chasing to avoid going there further and I'm actively searching for a new place. I'm interesting in system programming ( I use C++ but I know other languages ) , security, open source, electronic, telecommunication. I'm looking for an inclusive ambient ( I'm not German ) where I can talk with people with same interest and developing hardware is viewed favorably. I have necessity to specific tools, normally I have available all I need. Every suggestion is welcome, thank you in advance.

Our local space is pretty well run and we don’t have most of the things you mentioned.

Ours is run by a nonprofit with a board that manages to keep most of the riffraff out.

People basically being vagrants and living in the parking lot while working at the space is pretty common though.

The most annoying problem is people not cleaning up after themselves. I think that is a problem endemic to almost all maker spaces though.

The other dysfunctional nonsense you cite is more specific to your hackerspace in particular.

We had to spell out "you can't live here" in our membership agreement / orientation. Just too many issues there. We've had a few vanlifers and some van builders but as long as they're not primarily living in the building or our parking lot we're good. We also got rid of the couch.

There seems to be some cores. There's usually someone out there who's actually good at selling, even if they don't have a plan nor a product. You end up with legit YC alumni actually leading the pre-pre-YC prep programs. These are more dangerous and can sustain for years, especially with that whole cockroach surviving on ramen thing.

Smaller ponds have smaller fish. What a friend does (who I met on HN!) is to bring in an existing online community offline. That seems to work quite well, and it sustains until one of the dysfunctional communities collapses and swarms the popular communities.

I also find that being relentlessly helpful drives off some of the bullying types. HN-style guidelines seem to help. Assume goodwill. Don't talk down, educate. Don't assume someone hasn't read the article (or isn't educated enough), quote a part of the article or link to a tutorial. Time out the people who start a lot of fights; some are just passionate. But the unapologetic bad apples should be handled quickly.