Alternatives to Thingiverse?

o_lampe

You might have noticed problems downloading designs from thingiverse. They complain about ad blockers, but from several comments in thingiverse community, I came to the conclusion they got hacked and had to take drastic measures to stop that.

There is a huge uproar about lost designs and suspicious accounts with only one design, but thousands of followers...

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm afraid thingiverse will be down for some time.
Are there any alternatives?
I've looked around, but most other sites only offer links to designs on thingiverse or they ask stupid amounts of money for an stl..

Barracuda72

@o_lampe
https://www.prusaprinters.org/
sure..its called prusaprinters but its for all...and nice side...if you upload your designs there you can earn Prusameters ( nice benefit who usually do open source stuff) If you want earn money with your own designs there are other sites ( mostly depending on what you design

mrehorstdmd

Try Youmagine.com

In my opinion/experience, Thingiverse isn't such a great loss. Thingiverse is the FaceBook of 3D printing- uncontrolled publishing of any stupid crap anyone cares to bother posting. There are a LOT of really awful "designs" there, many of which are unprintable using any current printing technology. Your first clue to a possibly (probably?) bad design is a lack of a photo of the printed object. It seems like some people post as much crap as they can on Thingiverse so they can claim that they have published 500 or 1000+ "designs", most of which are identical except for a minor tweak (kids bike license plates with different names, for example).

Prusa has started a design repository curated by human beings to keep out the kind of trash that has overwhelmed Thingiverse.

bberger

@barracuda72 this is what I'm doing (in fact already have done).

I don't run ad blockers as I generally support sites that use ads as an income but I can't even get onto Thingiverse anymore which fails hard with an JS error on the first request...

It's time for the world to move on.

oliof

It seems to work for me, and a commonly known work around to the "Download All" button being broken for months is to use /zip at the end of a thingiverse URL. That still works.

o_lampe

@bberger
I don't mind supporting thingi as well, but there are so many traps you can fall into by opening your firewall.
Images that run mouseover-scripts or single pixel images with shady content.

bberger

@o_lampe said in Alternatives to Thingiverse?:

@bberger
I don't mind supporting thingi as well, but there are so many traps you can fall into by opening your firewall.
Images that run mouseover-scripts or single pixel images with shady content.

Opening the firewall != not using an Ad Blocker

zapta

@oliof said in Alternatives to Thingiverse?:

That still works.

That summarizes well the current state of Thingieverse.

Two alternatives I am using:

https://cults3d.com/

https://grabcad.com/library

Phaedrux

http://myminifactory.com

o_lampe

Thanks you all for the responses!
I felt a bit lost these days, not knowing where to find inspiration. And even the worst designs can be an inspiration.

zapta

Thingieverse is a sad place these days. A relic from the time where MakerBot was an integral part of the makers community.

Phaedrux

For what it is/was thingiverse provided a great outlet for printable content. I don't think the hobby would have grown as much as it has without it. Likely something else would have rose up to fill the void eventually, but it was there at the right time when nothing else was. It's current state is sad to see. I don't envy Makerbot/stratasys for having to try and keep it up and running all this time. It's definitely not profitable. Trying to recoup some of the investment with ads is understandable in a way.

SupraGuy

I've moved all of my stuff (Except for some half-baked things that weren't any good) onto Prusaprinters.org myself. Probably moves some of the crap over, too, honestly.

I've recently become a little more serious about my CAD development, so hopefully better things coming.

JoergS5

@mrehorstdmd said in Alternatives to Thingiverse?:

first clue to a possibly (probably?) bad design is a lack of a photo of the printed object.

funny, I take a similar approach:

check whether there is a make and which quality it has. This also gives information about the printer used and whether it's high quality printer
check documentation, this also gives information about knowledge of the designer. If there is information that the design is based on some former things, it is a sign of quality additionally.
I prefer things where the source is given, preferably OpenScad. There are still people who think just because they built a simple model, they developed something they have to protect their IP lol.

bberger

@phaedrux I'm not necessarily opposed to ads. Especially on a free platform. But currently they have bigger problems than ads. It's become impossible to use the site all together on Windows 11..

oliof

@bberger works on my win11 box.

bberger

@oliof just curious - is there a W11 setting that I missed? I have no ad blocker, no pihole or any other hw-based ad blockers. No VPN, nothing. Clean W11 install.

Errors out instantly:

Does load in Edge, but complains about me using an ad blocker and doesn't let me download stuff.

I'm a linux guy, just use the W11 machine for gaming and F360 - so I may have missed something obvious?

I still count it as unprofessional that it completely errors out when GTM can't be loaded. I'm not the only one.

oliof

@bberger I'm not disputing your experience and I completely agree with you that it's a total mess and unprofessional. I've not made any changes to the configuration and it works for me in stock Windows11 with stock edge (although Firefox is my daily driver except for Kiri:moto).

bberger

@oliof not arguing at all here. Just trying to find the cause here as obiously some BS on my stock W11 install is blocking scripts...