A couple of months ago Thingiverse had a phase where users complained every day about the site on this subreddit. People wanted to start new communities with new features but they all came to the same conclusion: Creating a new community from scratch is very hard with the current competitors and no models. That was the point I started a new side project: Download Thingiverse. Round about a month ago I posted my first results I gathered and the public feedback was mixed. Some users had legal concerns and some blamed me for the slow site. The feedback over chat were more promising. I was able to pick out 10 people who helped me spread the actual downloads globally. Thingiverse uses Amazon AWS with a good caching strategy. According to my metrics the downloads had a cache hit ratio of round about 80%. No massive additional load was generated in any way. Thingiverse took no damage from this. Enough technical stuff!With the help from this community I present to you the first Thingiverse dump. What’s inside the box?2088 GByte (2.04 Tbyte) of uncompressed tar files containing 1407580 ZIP files. Each ZIP file represents one thing and contains the files provided by the uploaderA gzip compressed metadata.json file containing additional info: The original Thingiverse ID, author/uploader name, title and licenseA README.md containing more informationsThere are only models included which were published under a copyleft license like Creative Commons or GPL. Use them to start your own community or just keep the files as backup. Check the corresponding thing license for more informations. These files are free from copyright protected material owned by Thingiverse like rendered previews.The files are distributed over BitTorrent. You can get the torrent file here or use this magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ac040dc8f9d26bd0bad0592829ddede6355a4ccb&dn=thingiverse-1&tr=https%3A%2F%2Ftracker.hama3.net%3A443%2Fannounce. Please: Make sure that you can also seed the files! BitTorrent itself is not agains the law in most countries! It’s only illegal when you distribute copyright protected files over it like movies. Many linux distributions distribute their ISO files over BitTorrent and you wouldn’t consider it illegal. Please inform yourself if BitTorrent is probibited by your local law or by your ISP.At the end I want to thank all designers publishing their creations under a copyleft license. Please use the files to start your own community. The thing licenses allows you to do that! If you use the files please give a proper attribution. https://ift.tt/2muXJlg