With more and more alternatives appearing to Lego which also increase in variety and even surpass at times Lego quality, why focus just on this company for a brick building community? I for example have been badly burned by Lego’s handling of the Mindstorms brand and there are more compatibility broken product lines from Lego.
Is posting other brands alright here? Will it lead to unpleasant conflicts from Lego, if their brand name is used?
Offbrand bricks are just fine. The reason I picked the Lego name is because everyone knows it. So no worries! If you want to make a specific community for offbrand bricks, I’d be glad to pin it!
I think this was the right call, discoverability is just so much better than any recombination of “interlocking building bricks” or something. “Lego” is very close to being a generic category name anyway, in my opinion. As long as the community is as small over here as it is right now, splintering it even further wouldn’t be a wise move, I think.
That’s a good decision I think. Calling it lego because it’s the most famous brand, but allowing anything that’s compatible.
Not sure if this is going to be an issue in future, but there are also building blocks that use a non compatible system like nanoblocks. At some point you might have to decide if those are acceptable too!
I dunno, why does everyone blow their nose on a kleenex?
Lego is eponymous for plastic building blocks. If you call the forum anything else, you aren’t going to be recognizable and easy to find.
I mean, hell, there’s people that don’t even know there’s actual brands other than lego at all
That’s a problem in some ways. Lego alternatives are legal and simply competing products. Continuing to equal a whole product category to one brand is not helpful. It might have been a colloquial decision and be fine like you suggested. Unfortunately, Lego takes legal action against such attempts.
I understand the intentional misnaming of competitor products as Legos (not “Lego” mind you) in this incident, but the lawyers advocated for a video takedown. And I feel this community could be threatened by this as well. https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/held-der-steine-lego-abmahnung-gattungsbegriff-markenrecht/ Unfortunately it is in German, but it continues a very detailed lawyer’s perspective of what happened there.
On reddit, there’s the r/lepin community for other lego “clones”, someone will make such a community on here too probably
This is lego, because people want to discuss the lego company and product from them!
Also, there is no rule about posting non-lego product on this community (that may change maybe?)
Makes sense. The Reddit Lego community is pretty active, so keeping it focused helps. That said, I appreciate the openness here for other block brand posts for the time being.
When a lepin community (or anything else regarding other bricks) join Lemmy, i’ll be sure to join them, other bricks manufacturer are cheaper and has way more diversity!
Honestly I don’t see the need to have multiple communities for the same hobby. We’re all adults here, people shouldn’t care what name is stamped on your plastic building brick system. Needless division only works to make us smaller on arbitrary lines.
why focus just on this company for a brick building community?
i mean, because it is !lego, rather than !brickbuilding
i dont see why competing products or alternatives should be discussed at length in a community that is about lego
Why are you opposed to offbrand bricks? The way I look at it the patents are expired and the purpose of patents is to enable a short term monopoly to create a profit motive for innovation. But after the patents expire then the invention belongs to everyone to build upon.
I dislike 1:1 copies of Lego sets. But copying the bricks is fine with me- and actually a good thing long term I think.
1:1 copies are not fine by me, because it is just straight up product piracy. Very hard so have sympathy for that.