Hello all, and welcome to the official GunCAD Index Forums, a place for everyone to discuss DIY gun content and anything adjacent. Feel free to browse around -- things should feel pretty familiar to the average redditard.

If you haven't yet, hit "Sign Up" over on the left-hand sidebar to make an account and get to posting! Plus button in the top-right is what you're after, and it doubles as the form for making Communities.

If you'd rather browse, either scroll through the feed on the main page by hitting the logo in the top-left or hit "Communities" in the top-right and browse for a subreddit community that seems interesting.

Differences to Reddit

The site runs on a piece of software that's adjacent to reddit, but comes with a few key differences:

• The flow of upvoting/downvoting/crossposting content onto subreddits communities should come intuitively
• There's a big @forum.guncadindex.com at the end of several URLs and embedded in several places on your UI. It's just like when you see :matrix.org when you're on Matrix, don't worry that much about it
• There are very few communities at time of writing -- I'm leaving it up to you guys how you want to organize. Build them for different release groups, make c/glock or c/blc or c/mpms, whatever floats your boat
• Data is controlled by me, The Shittinator. And seeing as how I run the GunCAD Index, I don't have any issues with directly linking to content or discussing the nitty gritty of designing and building firearms. There are still some restrictions though, just to keep everyone out of hot water -- see the sidebar
• When /r/fosscad figures out their plan of attack for the future, if it includes something like Lemmy, users here will be able to talk transparently with their instance. If you're a FOSSCAD moderator and have questions, hit me up!

Q&A

Q: Why?

A: Where do I start? /r/fosscad's kablammo, the community wants a platform, I've been specifically asked to spin this up by several community members, I have the know-how from a past life on the fediverse, and I can.

Plus, this particular platform comes with the benefit of federation, which means other Lemmy communities can interact with us, reducing community sharding while preserving data sovereignty.

Q: What is this place exactly?

A: This is a Lemmy forum running the Photon UI system. It's a piece of software that functions a lot like reddit, but can be self-hosted and can talk to other Lemmy instances (or other things that speak its language), allowing federation. It's a lot like email -- if you're on outlook.com, you can talk back and forth with gmail.com guys no problem because both servers speak SMTP.

Q: Is there a good mobile app?

A: Yes, you want any app that supports Lemmy -- there are a lot of them out there. I'm personally trying out Eternity on Android. For iOS, people are liking mlem.

Q: Can it look more like a site I'm familiar with?

A: https://red.guncadindex.com/

Q: What kind of data do you collect?

A: As part of signing up, you're trusting me to store your username, hashed password, email address, and all your posts. It's either that or I manually approve every signup. Use a burner if you want, or you could spin up your own Lemmy instance and federate with us. That's fine too.