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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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3DPrinting
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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.
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.