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.
Fediverse itself is still “early phase”
There are plenty of proposal of features social web community, handled W3C organization, such as easier way to find content (if the instance want it to be public.)
There’s definitely a value of community being able toset up instance of their own 3D pirinting models.
Yes, because everything needs to be a social web. Fuck off with that nonsense. Sometimes a database just needs to be a database. The last thing we need is more echo chambers in every damn hobby.
There are always needs for self-hosting for everything.
I can see some education institution set up their 3D model instance, and make it federated with other entities.
The problem is content discovery, right? As I said before, people are working to fix that right now.
Social web is basically similar to early internet, where discovering new things is hard.
Yeah, I don’t need to make friends to find stl files. A database with a lookup function will do fine.