There were some experiments in creating something else, but in the end we mostly ended-up with more sites run by different printer companies.
One of the ideas I had at the time was to make something based on Git, so that it could be distributed instead of being a single site under the control of a single entity. Of course the extent of most people's experience with Git (if they have any at all) comes from Github which erases the naturally distributed nature of Git.
I've been revisiting these ideas as of late for various reasons and thinking about what I'd want out of something like this today. Of course what matters to me probably doesn't overlap with the majority of people using 3D printers anymore, but that's OK. You can't please everyone and when you try you often please no one.
When I think about the way I work I often start by "sketching-out" a new design in a so gle OpenSCAD file and either drop it into an existing general-purpose Git repository for models or create a new repo specifically for the project. For me, the least disruptive way to interact with a website for sharing models would simply be to add the site as a git remote and push a branch to it whenever I want to publish or re-publish something, kinda like Heroku.
The receiving server could then render some HTML based on the contents of the repository and add it to a search index others can use to find models on the site. It could be as simple as that.
If you wanted to get fancy, you could establish some conventions around how the repository is laid-out, placing printable files in a designated directory and design/source files in another, parsing OpenSCAD files to provide parametric customization, etc. You could even parse slicer setting files to create printer profiles for each member and even generate gcode directly. The possibilities are almost endless.
It poses a somewhat high technical barrier for publishers, but for people looking for models it could be as easy as using any other site.
I'm going to start experimenting with this locally and see how hard it is to get a basic publishing/indexing server running. If I can get that far maybe I'll setup a public server for others to experiment with. I want to retain the distributed nature of git, which I think means mostly providing a means for linking the search index of multiple sites. I have a few ideas for this but exactly how it will work will depend on what I use to implement the index.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026