In 2014, it was tough to be a keyboard nerd. I was using a 4-year-old keyboard I\u2019d bought from Mattias that used Alp white switches similar to what had been found in old Mac keyboards. I desperately wanted something with the then-fabled Cherry Blue switch, but it was hard to find anything outside of a smattering of hard-to-find Corsair keyboards and imports from Ducky based in Taiwan.<\/p>\n

Eight years later people actually can understand everything I just typed above. Okay, maybe not everyone, but the size of the keyboard community has multiplied by many factors in the last eight years and there are more people than ever that know the difference between a Cherry Blue switch and an Alp white switch. <\/p>\n

Over the next three weeks, I\u2019m hosting a very fun miniseries of the Vergecast<\/em> exploring the way creators are building fandoms for gadgets online and driving the development of categories that can often be underserved by the big gadget makers in the space. We\u2019re gonna talk to guys making trackballs on 3D printers, and a man who has been building accessible Xbox controllers for 20 years, but first we gotta talk about keyboards\u2014because few gadgets have quite had success from online creators that keyboards have had.<\/p>\n