Well they're not a charity, so my bet is on enshittification of some sort under the guise of "improving the experience for makers and users".
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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Stratasys and Ultimaker already killed it.
Oh come on now, that's a defeatist attitude!
There's always scope to further extract value for shareholders!
Yeah it has been dogshit for years which is why Printables and Makerworld are so popular.
It feels like printables has leaned heavily in to the subscription-model with many users now locking content behind subscriptions to their profile. It sucks that prusa/printables are willingly participating in enshittification by implementing such a feature.
Is it finally time for ManyFold, our very own Fediverse 3d object repository, to shine? Look, you can tag/follow/etc an object right from here, like this one: @w9b6w6sxkxkr@3dprint.social
I got an error when I clicked that @ link?
Aww, i guess it's atill kinda janky unfortunately... Works in theory at least! And works on my client?
What is it supposed to show? I'm using a Chrome web browser.
It depends a bit on what kind of media the platform you're viewing it from is capable of displaying. From Piefed all I see is a small snippet of information about what the object is. If any platform (other than ManyFold itself) implements a 3d viewer, it ought to let you see and rotate the object itself. Kinda like how a PeerTube video shows up on Mastodon?
Is there consensus on who would be best to migrate your "things" to? Maybe what do folks think of Printables?
I do more publishing than downloading. And I'm interested in one that's in the spirit of FOSS. Friendly to permissive licenses. (Unfriendly to more proprietary licenses is a big plus IMO. I'm a fan of attribution and copyleft requirements. Noncommercial limitations, I'm relatively indifferent to.) Not enshittified and not likely to enshittify any time soon.
Printables belongs to Prusa, so, below average enshittification rate?
I hope prusa still has that copy of the site...
I think the one I use the most is printables for mechanic parts and cults 3d for minis. I used to use mainly myminifactory, but they added a managing fee and that's made me avoid the platform since you pay a bit extra than the published price.
I've been trying to avoid makerworld, and creativity cloud since they seem to go in the direction to make it slowly more closed.
Thingiverse was fine, although it seemed a bit abandoned, but if you were looking for older models sometimes it's the only place.
I think it will be fine for a year or so, but they will push some kind of subscription or premium features.
The community on thingiverse used to be more about sharing and open source, and that seems to have moved mainly to printables. At least we have that option (for now).