Where do folks prefer to host their 3d models and designs? Do you use one site, or multiple?
I originally started on Thingiverse, but switched to Printables after it launched and that has been my main location for uploading to. I recently decided to copy all my models to Thingiverse and Thangs, in additional to Printables, but I’m not sure its worth the effort to maintain the listings on multiple sites.
I love the Printables site, I think it has the best user experience, but Thingiverse seems to reach a bigger audience. Thangs I find useful for the search, but I’m not sure its worth hosting models there as well.
I come from the “old cloth” so to speak. I know Josef from the old days, and I trust him with Printables. Thingiverse was originally Makerbot property, then Stratasys bought Makerbot, and more recently Ultimaker bought Makerbot.
Thingiverse is going to be where all of the stuff originated from, but they don’t have any incentives to continue posting there. Printables gives points that can go toward getting their filament, which is really nice, and generally the content there is cleaner and also generally tested beforehand.
Nobody who judges a site based on how many ads there are is worth listening to. They aren’t even smart enough to be running an ad-blocker, so why even take their opinion into account anyway?
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smart enough to be running an ad-blocker, so why even take their opinion into account anyway?
This. ☝🏽🤣
Printables.
I started on Thingiverse, then copied everything over to Printables when it became available. The traffic difference between them is huge. I uploaded my models to Printables in March 2022, and my total downloads is just over 2K for all of them. On Thingiverse, I have 4K downloads in just the last 30 days.
I still post most things to both sites, but sometimes I get lazy or will “do it later” and just not.
I’m seeing the same, A LOT more views and downloads on the models that I just copied across to Thingiverse in the last week.
I don’t have many but also started in Thingiverse and moved to Printables. On the occasion that I make something new it just goes into Printables.
That said I usually start a search using Thangs since it searches a bunch of sites in one go
I do printables. I used to do Thingiverse, but it was garbage back in the day. IDK how it is now. I’m contemplating doing both Printables and Thingi. Printables because I want it to work, but Thingi because it’ll get the furthest reach. I tend to do two things: one for the community I want to work and the other on the most popular.
An alternative is posting on GitHub. It’s not as easy to search for models there, but you can put all your project files there in one place. STL, build log, docs, code for the devices it may use, PCB files… it also keeps a history of your files so you can back track to a previous file. Plus it’s free, ad free, and open source.
GitHub is not open source
I think thingiverse is like the Reddit of models and printables is like the Lemmy.
I recall there being some issue people had with thingiverse but it’s still where all the action is.
The “some issue” people had with thingiverse was that their Terms of Service gave Makerbot irrevocable license to use your models, patent your models, distribute and sublicense your models, and make money from your models without compensation or attribution to you.
Not unlike Cults
Well, also just that the site had kind of deteriorated from lack of maintenance–the search didn’t work (you had to use Google with site:thingiverse.com), model pages were incredibly slow to load, etc. They’ve fixed a lot of that recently, but for a year or so it seemed borderline unusable.
The issue I’m referring to happened like…10 years ago. Had nothing to do with slow loading or anything. That’s why elsewhere I said I was cut from the old cloth – none of you new guys have any idea what went on in the RepRap communities, which is ultimately the core group of 3D printer enthusiasts.
At the time printables didn’t exist, and nowadays all of the people who are 3D printing have no clue what open source is, why they should care, why they need to defend it, etc. I attempted for years to educate the Reddit 3D printing communities, but it’s too mainstream now. People just see 3D printing as a machine rather than an entire hobby/community.
Fair enough, I only got in to the hobby around 2015. But site issues were another reason that a lot of folks migrated to printables recently, so I do think it’s possible that’s part of what Fogle was referring to.
FWIW though, I suspect that a lot of the folks here in the Fediverse do actually care about open source, open standards, and the value in defending truly public resources.
printables is like the Lemmy.
Except Printables has advertisements everywhere. They aggressively pressure users to sign up for an account (in a way that feels very “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”) They push their particular slicer. They promote the Prusa printers, etc.
Not that Thingiverse doesn’t a) advertise MakerBot stuff and b) have other problems (not really being maintained, mostly), but Printables feels more aggressive about the advertising.
I published some open source code projects on Github. When Microsoft acquired Github, the same day that was announced, I googled to find the most popular compeditor to Github (which seemed to be Gitlab) and jumped ship. Now I regret not taking more time to look for and evaluate alternatives. (I wish I’d gone to Codeberg instead. I might jump ship again one day, though much of my open source code is in Go which has a convention of including the domain on which the code is published in most source files, so it’d be a bit of a pain.)
I’ve published a good handful of things on Thingiverse. I’m not happy trusting Thingiverse to host them per se. But they haven’t done enough evil shit to make me want to migrate elsewhere yet. When they do (and they probably will), I’ll definitely be taking my time and choosing the most generally unlikely to be enshittified ever in the future that I can find. And I don’t feel like that’s likely to be Printables at least from what I’ve seen of them so far.
I can’t say I’ve noticed advertisements on Printables, other than obviously having Prusa content on the main page. I run pihole so maybe that’s blocking stuff. And I’m signed-in as a user in order to post my models, so don’t get any nags about sign-up. I actually feel that Printables has been pretty open and approachable for non-Prusa users.
Will be interesting to see how Thingiverse evolves, looks like they have been making updates recently after years of neglect. With other vendors starting to push their own 3d model sites I think there is a risk the whole space could become fragmented, but on the other had having a just handful of dominant sites increases the risk of enshitification.
If you have trouble finding the browser add-on that rhymes with “uBlock Origin”, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Literally describing the situation with Ultimaker right now. They hired Daid Bramm, slapped all of Ultimakers logos all over the slicer, attempt to force you into signing up for an account, etc.
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On Github/Gitlab - or a self hosted? Doesn’t seem like to most discoverable way of hosting models, unless you’re also linking to the git repo from one of the model sites. I do use git to version my OpenSCAD models, but just on a private selfhosted gitea instance.
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I do that too as it holds all the files for a project. Not just the shell of the device. GitHub could benefit from a tag search so something where you could add a 3D printing tag to your search and only show repos with 3D printing related files (CAD, STL, 3MF…) or manual tags.
Fediverse for model sharing? :P
Now that’s an interesting idea - Lemmy3D, kbiniverse, FireFishables? Someone needs to start making this now!
I wonder if you could just build it off of a mastodon service backend-wise where it just toots out links to the file download to everyone else.
I use thangs.com
Any particular reason why Thangs? I like the search, but I find the model management is not as intuitive
I was watching Zach Friedman on the Voidstar Labs YT channel and he was hosting gridfinity there.
I like the search feature, but I don’t upload all that often. You can always cross post against all of the sites.
MyMiniFactory is also good.
Zack’s Gridfinity vids were the reason I bought a printer in the first place so Thangs was my first stop, and I love that their search also indexes Printables/Thingiverse/Cults3D/etc.
Printables has the best UI and community engagement though. Seriously, in 2023 there’s no excuse for your website not having a dark mode option.
I put my first model up on Cults, Thingiverse, and I think one other site… so far only the Cults one seems to have gotten any traction, so I’m focusing on that.
Cults is noTORious for fucking over creators. Wiser to avoid.
Up to and including doxing someone because they publicly complained about Cults refusing to give them the money people have paid to download their creations.
Plus their sites runs like a bag of dicks.
So many gawdamned dicks.
Printables, I don’t use any other site for sharing models. I sometimes use Thingiverse and Cults3D for downloading.
