I’m just curious if anyone knows of an effort to build a federated version of something like Thingiverse, Printables, Thangs, etc. I’m not really a fan of the centralized control, commercial tie-ins and profit motivations of those and similar sites, but the community of collaboration and remixing designs means they are basically indispensable for time efficient 3d printing, they’re basically like the Github of 3d printing.
For me the ideal would be to have a federated alternative where users can host and share their own creations and collections, as well as rate and comment each other’s designs to help improve discoverability of the best models in the community. This seems like something that would be a good fit for the ActivityPub protocol but I’m not sure if there is something like this already out there. All I could find is this old reddit post that seems to have gotten a lot of support (and good suggestions for features) in the comments but has gone nowhere as far as I can tell.
Yeah I currently use Printables just because I trust Prusa more than the others, but at the end of the day Prusa is still a private company that could change its policies and decide to fuck over all its users or sell out to a company that does.
Thingiverse is just slow and crappy these days, Makers world defaults to locking everything down and not allowing remixes, so an open federated alternative would be great.