I’m the creator behind Duckeebs – a platform built to centralize all the ICs and GBs scattered across Geekhack, Reddit, and Discord into one searchable hub.
How I got here: Like many of you, I spent way too much time jumping between tabs trying to track interest checks and group buys. Missed a few I really wanted because the updates were buried in a 50-page forum thread. Figured there had to be a better way.
What Duckeebs does:
Aggregates ICs/GBs with real-time status updates
Search and filter by layout, profile, vendor, timeline
Community voting to surface what people actually care about
Currently working on: A new feature called SwapKey – an AI tool that lets you preview how keycap sets would look on your board before committing to a GB. Still in beta, would love feedback from this community.
Great tool- as a runner of IC/GB, one of the things I’d like to see is if you’re scraping using automated tools- make sure you set your algo to revisit the GB periodically. For example, the Welles GB Images/kitting have been updated periodically, but is not reflected in the post.
Also, if you track updates, maybe see a “last updated” filter based on the last update to the first post in GH. Some people make the GH post and never do anything with it, but this would allow people to search/gauge by how much people have updated the post.
Our system does revisit posts periodically, but currently only updates stats (votes, replies) – not the actual post content like renders or kitting changes. We’ll fix that.
Adding a “last updated” filter is on the list too.
In this case, GeekHack, the forum site that was formerly a much more central hub for the hobby, but is still important as a place to post legitimate interest Checks and Group Buys.
This is off-topic, sorry, but: what is your guys’ general sense of what the current “hubs” are? I’m only really active here on keebtalk, I lurk Deskthority sometimes, and I’m not super aware of what goes on elsewhere or what proportion of hobbyists are in what places.
Reddit’s mechanicalkeyboards sub, and especially Discord.
It’s all fragmented across Discord, and while I’m using it more, I still dislike the way it is not searchable from the outside, poorly searchable from the inside, and is sort of implied to be close to real-time, so it’s more chat than people saying something they’re comfortable with existing on the internet long-term. The fragmentation also means that individual servers can disappear in the wink of an eye. While that’s nominally true of sites like keebtalk, the “general purpose” nature means that it’s less likely. Even the husk of Deskthority is mostly still around.
Definitely feels more fragmented than it used to be. 10 years ago, I used to just have geekhack as THE hub. Wonder if that’s just because the hobby has grown so much that there are too many niches to contain in a single place.
That said, I agree with @wjrii , seems like individual Discords have popped up to serve these niches.
Yes. If a designer doesn’t want their posts summarized by AI or their sets used in AI renders, they can simply message us. We’re happy to either hide the post entirely or display only the original content without any AI-generated summaries or renders.
