I come from the "old cloth" so to speak. I know Josef from the old days, and I trust him with Printables. Thingiverse was originally Makerbot property, then Stratasys bought Makerbot, and more recently Ultimaker bought Makerbot.

Thingiverse is going to be where all of the stuff originated from, but they don't have any incentives to continue posting there. Printables gives points that can go toward getting their filament, which is really nice, and generally the content there is cleaner and also generally tested beforehand.

Nobody who judges a site based on how many ads there are is worth listening to. They aren't even smart enough to be running an ad-blocker, so why even take their opinion into account anyway?

Printables.

I started on Thingiverse, then copied everything over to Printables when it became available. The traffic difference between them is huge. I uploaded my models to Printables in March 2022, and my total downloads is just over 2K for all of them. On Thingiverse, I have 4K downloads in just the last 30 days.

I still post most things to both sites, but sometimes I get lazy or will "do it later" and just not.

I don't have many but also started in Thingiverse and moved to Printables. On the occasion that I make something new it just goes into Printables.

That said I usually start a search using Thangs since it searches a bunch of sites in one go

I do printables. I used to do Thingiverse, but it was garbage back in the day. IDK how it is now. I'm contemplating doing both Printables and Thingi. Printables because I want it to work, but Thingi because it'll get the furthest reach. I tend to do two things: one for the community I want to work and the other on the most popular.

An alternative is posting on GitHub. It’s not as easy to search for models there, but you can put all your project files there in one place. STL, build log, docs, code for the devices it may use, PCB files… it also keeps a history of your files so you can back track to a previous file. Plus it’s free, ad free, and open source.

I think thingiverse is like the Reddit of models and printables is like the Lemmy.

I recall there being some issue people had with thingiverse but it's still where all the action is.

expired

Fediverse for model sharing? :P

I use thangs.com

I put my first model up on Cults, Thingiverse, and I think one other site... so far only the Cults one seems to have gotten any traction, so I'm focusing on that.

Printables, I don't use any other site for sharing models. I sometimes use Thingiverse and Cults3D for downloading.