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.
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.
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