Beyond building LEGO® sets straight from the box, there is a fantastic community of LEGO fans, who are filled with creativity. They use this creative spark to craft their own LEGO creation, most commonly known as MOCs. Once these wonderful creations are complete, there is nothing better than sharing them with the world. Which is where MOCBuilder comes into play. This new social photo-sharing hub has a simple aim to provide a singular place for LEGO fans to share their creations and discover others. The site has been created by Andy Ford, who explains it better himself.
Launched in July 2020, mocbuilder.com is a social photo-sharing site for people who build LEGO MOCs. Members can join for free and share unlimited posts with up to 6 photos per post. Posts can be tagged and users can create “Collections” to organize their posts (any post can be put into any number of collections). Users can like and comment on posts and can follow their favourite builders to have a customized feed/timeline show posts only from those they follow.
For many years, Flickr has been the main hub of activity for MOC builders to share their work. However, more and more artists have been leaving Flickr and moving to other platforms like Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This has caused a fracturing of the MOC building community. And none of these platforms were ever built just for MOCs, so anywhere we go, the MOC community has been a niche sub-group of some larger general group.
With the demise of MOCpages, there really wasn’t one site dedicated just to MOCs (some sites do let you share MOCs as a side feature to other features, but it’s not the main focus).
So with a passion for LEGO MOCs, a desire to give back to the community, and my 20+ years of industry experience in web software design/development and user experience research/testing; I decided to create mocbuilder.com – a welcoming and inclusive social photo-sharing site just for MOCs and MOC builders.
I launched the beta version in July 2020 and personally invited some of my favourite artists to help with beta testing. As of late November, we have over 120 MOCs posted and we now have over 40 users with at least 1 MOC posted and about 25 users who’ve liked or commented on posts but have not posted any MOCs themselves. It’s a humble beginning but I’m encouraged by all the feedback so far.
