Hello all, and welcome to the official GunCAD Index Forums, a place for anyone to discuss DIY gun content and all things adjacent. Browse around, everything should feel pretty familiar.

If you haven’t yet, hit “Sign Up” in the top-right corner to make an account and get to posting. You can make posts in existing communities or create whole new ones if you want your own space.

If you’d rather browse, either scroll through the feed on the main page by hitting the logo in the navbar or hit “Communities” and browse for a subreddit community that seems interesting. Play with the selectors and sort options, too.

A Note on Reddit's Rule Changes

/r/FOSSCAD was banned a while ago, but starting October 9th, Reddit is adjusting its rules such that the following are now verboten:

  • User-to-user and user-to-vendor transactions of firearms and accessories (including things like magazines) where one of them is not a “licensed vendor”. This completely destroys /r/GAFS and blows away all Super Safety advertising, too – check out !supersafety@fosscad.io

  • Any directions on how to make a firearm, including 3D-printable design files and where to get them. This will absolutely be used to shut down even the thinly-veiled “Odd Sea” posting, which turns all of the 3D-printed gun sub hydra heads into glorified build showcases, if they’re not getting banned outright.

The site is now actively, outwardly, and aggressively hostile to gun content more than they’ve ever been.

Comparison of Lemmy 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, but:

  • 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

  • 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

FAQ

Most of the FAQ exists in the site’s global sidebar, but here are some extra ones:

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

A: https://forum.guncadindex.com/

Q: This site looks like dogass. Is there a better frontend?

A: https://p.forum.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.

Support Us

This site stays up via funds from the GunCAD Index’s sponsors and your individual contributions. If you can, please consider supporting us:

  • Hoffman TacticalEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    Thank you a ton for getting all this rather not fun networking stuff set up for the community. The Index has been a huge help, and I’m sure this forum will be the same.

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Thanks bunches man, always happy to help.

      And hey, if you ever want to spin one up yourself, feel free to reach out – I’ll help you avoid all the day-one issues. Another node in the federation is always welcome!

  • 404logicnotfoundEnglish
    12·
    2 months ago

    FYI got an error about token from email verification but login worked

  • dogenadoEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    You’re doing amazing work for Guncad/FOSSCAD in general. Thank you for everything you have done.

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      <3

      I’m in talks right now with Scout to see how this new platform will fit into the larger GunCAD ecosystem moving forward. I’ll have much more to discuss in the near future

      • dogenadoEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Scout is a good guy. I’m sure they’ll work toward including the index into it’s federation. I’m excited for the future without reddit overlords looming over us.

          • dogenadoEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            Will you be opening this up to work with more “Lemmy” instances?

            • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              I think there are a few things I need to wrangle to get federation to work, but yes, I do plan on it.

  • FabioEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Marking territory as the first Brazilian on the forum <3 🇧🇷

  • GunPrntrEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Dude, seriously, thank you for this. We really needed a place of our own to talk openly about our hobby and honestly it was just a matter of time before reddit gave us the boot. This forum format is leagues better than Discord, which makes it hard to find answers to questions asked some time ago. I know we lost a treasure trove of information and a lot of fosscad history with r/fosscad being deleted but hopefully we can rebuild it here.

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Agreed – Discord is an information black hole. The less we use it as a repository, the better.

  • FlawlesCowboyEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Might be a good idea to spin up our own gundeals over here since reddit would love to get that taken down as well.

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Possibly in time. I don’t want to jump into handling sales until we know for sure the forum is solid, that we have moderation staff for it, and that we understand any potential legalese around it

  • FieldExpedientEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    It’s good to be here. Thanks for letting us sign up on the GCI instance.

  • BrotatoEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Love this! Never knew about lemmy but this sounds like exactly what we need… glad to be here day 1… can’t stop the signal

  • spamkingEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Thank you for jumping on this so quickly . . .

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I figured being quick was really important here. I don’t want us to fall into the trap of 5 different splinter subreddits that all face the same existential problem and share none of their userbase.

      • spamkingEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Amen to that . . . a consolidated location makes the most sense.

  • Starrcade95English
    3·
    2 months ago

    This is exactly what we needed for this community–if Kiwifarms taught us anything, it’s that our own independent platform fosters the best chance for our survival.

    • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Truly. It also taught us that even DNS registrars will slap your dick if you’re reviled enough on the internet.

      Which reminds me: I should set up an onion link for this site.

      • lemmyseethingsEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Or maybe look into I2P? I think it’s no more difficult than making an onion site but I forget if it’s like, inaccessible from the regular WWWeb

        • The ShittinatorOPMAEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          I mean, we already have Tor hooked up. I’d likely just set up a subdomain on our onion address.

          Note that we can’t federate without a publicly-resolvable DNS name, though.

  • sadoEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Nicely done. Can’t stop the signal.