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.
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Check out manyfold. I haven’t used it myself, but their features include ActivityPub federation.
Set to enabled to turn on cross-server ActivityPub federation features such as remote following, webfinger discovery, etc. If you want your Manyfold instance to be part of the Fediverse, this is the setting for you.
So far, this seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks so much!
I don’t think connecting to the fediverse would give a lot of utility.
Federation alone would give a lot of utility. The whole point is not to be a walled garden of discrete silos. If I can post on Lemmy from Mastodon, why shouldn’t I be able to post a comment on a model?
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.
Exactly this. I don’t want to have to dig through 100 communities all spread out to find things. Not everyone needs “my own” whatever. You can be centralized and public. Federation is just another buzzword like blockchain.
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.
I’m not against distributed storage but treating a file catalog like it is a social platform seems like being a hammer seeing everything as a nail.
I don’t want to have to dig through 100 communities all spread out to find things.
So don’t. Hang out on Lemmy.world. You’ll be fine here. It’s as centralized as you can get. All you’re really asking for is to deny others the ability to choose or run their own instance and still be able to talk to you, like I’m doing right now.
You realize a bunch of instances have blocked/defederated Lemmy.world, right? Exactly the kind of fragmentation I’d like to avoid. Literally other people chose who I can and can’t talk to already.
This is a hard pass.
What would the point of this be
Sharing your creations without a central hoster profiting from it, I guess.
