Luckily, we have competition, and https://printables.com/ is there.

Just switch to the prusa site. It's much better. Competition is good an all, but there's no reason to keep using thingiverse at this point.

On my back burner for a whole has been a federated thing-sharing server. A sort of “Mastodon for 3D objects”. I haven’t taken the time to build anything because I’ve been otherwise busy, but the idea that I could host my own stuff if I was wary of someone else’s EULA is nice.

Isn't "Mastodon for 3D objects" just a personal website that hosts .stl files? Last time I did a project that included 3D printed parts, I just attached models to a blog post.

I understand that not having models in a centralized repository brings problems with discoverability. So maybe a better project would be a search engine for 3D objects hosted on the long-tail web?

> Isn't "Mastodon for 3D objects" just a personal website that hosts .stl files?

Nope.

Its more like MediaGoblin[0], but decentralized like Fediverse[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaGoblin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

At the moment, that's exactly how I share my 3d Objects.

The magic of Mastodon is not that it's a Twitter clone, it's that it's federated, so any Mastodon instance can share it's "Toots"(ugh) with any other Mastodon instance (or advantageously, not).

In my imagined server, you would host your own 3D Files, and that data would be federated to other servers. Prusa might host it's server that has thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of objects, but when someone does a search, my dozens of objects show up there too.

Or a “dogpile” for 3d printed things, like yeggi.com?

The problem I see with Yeggi (and I've run into it a lot) is that it's just a web-scraping catalog. I've tried many times to download objects that were linked on Yeggi only to find that they've disappeared.

Django? If so, send me and email.

This merger includes a significant amount new cash being invested. Also, Stratasys will be taking backseat and becoming a minority investor. Ultimaker has continued to invest in Cura and make it available for many competing printers over the years. They understand the value of giving something back to a community. Thingiverse is one of the biggest and most important 3D printing communities out there. I know that a lot of people in Ultimaker (and I suspect MakerBot too) are keen to see Thingiverse be restored and improved.

I just use yeggi or thangs for search. They are much better for that.

Pretty sure they focused development resources on projects that made money.