gistfile1.txt

ezmobius	hey mind if i ask a question?	
Kliment	Sure	
What can I do for you?[6~	
ezmobius	so im thinking me and a few buddies are going to write a better, git backed thingiverse	
what would you really like to see in something like that?	
Kliment	Don't do it	
ezmobius	nah?	
Kliment	I don't want another thingiverse	
I want a ravelry for 3d printing	
ezmobius	whats ravelry?	
Kliment	See this is the problem	
Okay, let me explain	
ezmobius	please	
Kliment	Ravelry is a community for knitters	
It's ideally suited for its purpose, and grew organically from a very very simple thing	
It started as a database of yarns, projects, and patterns	
(materials, objects, models)	
ezmobius	gotcha so far	
Kliment	None of the patterns were hosted on the site itself.	
Some were in magazines, some were personally invented by the users and never written down, some were on blogs and websites	
This was an index of them, and it answered the following questions	
"I have this yarn. WHat have other people done with it?"	
"I have this pattern. What materials have other people used for it?[6~"	
"I have this pattern. What else has the same designer done?"	
"I have this pattern. What does it look like in real life as opposed to the marketing photos?"	
ezmobius	so what do you think would be the "simple thing" to start with then?	
Kliment	"I have this yarn. What does it look like knitted?"	
"I like what this person is doing. What other projects have they done?"	
ezmobius	database of materials etc? maybe im not following what you'd want for a 3d printed design sharing thing?	
what woudl you remove from thingiverse is maybe a good question?	
Kliment	The materials are not as important in this case	
ezmobius	right cuz they are fewer	
Kliment	I think, a database of users, objects, and models	
Materials is nice to have though, at least colors and places to get them	
ezmobius	i was going to make someting very simple to start with. but no ads ever. no bloated take 20 years to load pages. no makerbot shilling	
just user accounts. and objects. where each object has photos attached and either a git repo we make automatically or a linked github repo	
Kliment	Yeah no	
That's too much	
Users, objects, models	
An object is a printed instance of a model	
ezmobius	great feedback. but im trying to zone in on the base use case you want here. can you help me understand netter?	
Kliment	Look at those questions I showed you	
ezmobius	ok that helps. so users have accopunts and users have objects and models	
Kliment	Here is what I want this site to answer	
"I found this here STL. What does it look like printed?"	
"What else has this person designed that I might be interested in?"	
"How does this model look in green translucent PLA?"	
ezmobius	so you want to upload an stl and have me match it and display prints of it and the original design? and other stats related to it kinda thing?	
Kliment	Not at first, maybe later	
But say Greg has got some design on his github account, or triffid on his blog, or you on your site	
I want to be able to stick in a URL or blog name or designer name and see who on the site has printed it	
Activating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	the main thing i was trying to improve on thingiverse is the clusterfuck of good objects(for example gregs wades) having multiple things with lots of [edit]'s and links to "you really want this object" cuz there is no versioning in thingiverse and object models are much closewr to source code then static files?	
am i solving a non issue with that?	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
Kliment	Yes	
That could be solved with good search	
Activating Flood Protection	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
Kliment	Versioning and explicit derivative trees are good though	
But the main thing is, thingiverse is a closed system	
ezmobius	i mean wouldnt you like to fork an "object" on a thingiverse like site , add your tweaks and republish but still have it linked upstread in the docs, text and source?	
Activating Flood Protection	
Kliment	Ravelry is a very open system. Nearly all the patterns link to off-site resources	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	i'd want this site to also be open sourced in the codebase itself. and acdept community contributions	
Kliment	Oh, sure. I get that. But noone will use it	
ezmobius	why not?	
Kliment	Because it's confusing	
ezmobius	good enough syndrme?	
with thingiverse?	
Activating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	not if the git stuff is hidden for folks who understand	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
Kliment	The concept is confusing unless you've used github	
ezmobius	but it works like current thingivderse for folks who care not about git	
Kliment	Not just the UI	
ezmobius	id enable both	
Activating Flood Protection	
Kliment	I think current thingiverse is badly broken	
ezmobius	me too	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
Kliment	I also think you should sign up for Ravelry and see what a really good site looks like	
Used by 2million users	
ezmobius	already just did	
thx	
Kliment	If we can combine the ravelry model of being metadata for external resources coupled with a community with your idea of versioning and descendence trees, we have something	
But I don't want to have to upload everything to ezmobiusverse	
ezmobius	you want to use github? or your own blog?	
Kliment	If you have something on your site, or on a blog somewhere, or on github, there's no reason there can't be a node for that with just the metadata, and a link to the files	
Activating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	i also hosted github for the first 2 years of its life and could possibly do something with them instead of a separate thing. make my site just integrate with them instead	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	yeah thats easily done	
Kliment	No, that's just as bad	
The point is that it should not be a content silo	
Activating Flood Protection	
ezmobius	especially if we can crawl relevant other sites and try to pull that kind of meta data in automatically for you	
Deactivating Flood Protection	
Kliment	With only internal links	
Yep!	
ezmobius	well what if it were both?	
Kliment	That's sort of what ravelry is	
ezmobius	if you need a place to host your files you get that. but if you want to just lnink that works too?	
Kliment	They have hosted content (as of recently)	
But they started with just links	
ezmobius	i know probbaly tons of folks dont want to bother hosting their own shit somewhere. but tons of folks would prefer that	
Kliment	For example, I have a book of sock patterns here	
It's not available online	
But it's on Ravelry	
I can go there, check out what materials the various patterns use, see which are most popular, who has knitted what, what people complain about	
ezmobius	how is it up there?	
Kliment	You signed up?	
ezmobius	i mean where is it phycially hosted if its there but not "online"?	
i did but havent surfed yet	
Kliment	It's physically hosted on my bookshelf	
Like, actual physical bookshelf	
So the data itself is not online at all	
But the metadata is	
I'll show you	
ezmobius	 http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/two-hour-hat	
?	
Kliment	Heh	
That's a hosted one, yes	
Look	
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/sources/sock-innovation	
It's a physical paper book	
NOt online in any form	
ezmobius	ahh i see	
Kliment	But there are links to the individual pattern pages where people can comment on them and post their results	
There are links to errata and places to buy the book	
There are links to the forum topics about that designer	
And the groups that mention the book on their forums	
And a link to the designer's page	
Metadata	
ezmobius	ill have to explore this site some more and see how people are using it. very interesting though. id heard of this community before but never been into knitting myself. but someone mentioned it was a cool community though	
Kliment	Very	
Let me show you an externally hosted pattern	
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/shipwreck-shawl	
Metadata, notes, instructions	
And a link to the data itself	
ezmobius	got it. interesting. thanks alot. very good stuff to consider.	
Kliment	And here is an object page	
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/kliment/shipwreck-shawl	
Based on that same pattern	
So it started as just a simple database	
materials, patterns, projects, users	
Then came designers and sources	
Then came forums	
Then hosting	
Photo hosting	
ezmobius	gotcha now i understand	
Kliment	Ad sales	
Commercial patterns	
ezmobius	you thnk folks would want an option to sell their opbjects insetad of open sourcing them or is that overstepping?	
Kliment	But all the ads are within the community - you have to be a member to buy ads	
What I'm saying is don't do it all at once	
Let me show you how ravelry handles it	
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/renita This is a ravelry-hosted commercial pattern	
ezmobius	im fairly anti ads	
Kliment	That's fine too	
I'm trying to find one that is not hosted on ravelry but commercially available, hold on	
Here, see http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/tuch-shawl-lazykaty	
This is hosted on ravelry but also available to buy from a website	
So it lists the price and gives a link	
Ravelry initially financed itself by putting affiliate amazon and BN links on book pages	
Now they also make money from ads, cuts from the hosted pattern sales, and their paid photo hosting service (they do free photo hosting, but only up to a number of photos)	
The key takeaway, I guess, is that Ravelry in its original form as a database was useful for one person to keep track of her own projects, stash, and ideas	
So it worked and was good for something even when very few people were using it	
And its value grew as more people joined	
ezmobius	gotcha so keep it simple solve a real problem. release and grow from feedback form there?	
Kliment	Yes	
Give me a place to keep track of my own projects, and complain about other people's	
And I'll use it	
Don't force me to upload all the stuff I have elsewhere to it, and I'll use it for old projects too	
ezmobius	thanks a lot Kliment  appreciate it	
Kliment	Last attempt to do this failed badly	
ezmobius	oh didnt know there was previous attempt. what was it called?	
why did it fail?	
Kliment	atomtorrent. Too many cooks	
It was supposed to be what we just talked about	
ezmobius	yeah im familiar with too many cooks syndrome	
hence why im not soliticing advce in #reprap directly	
Kliment	It devolved into a git-backed fully distributed no single point of failure peer to peer encrypted deniable bittorrent backup thing	
ezmobius	fail	
Kliment	And then noone wanted to implement it anymore	
I really suck at web stuff	
And I don't find it exciting at all	
Which is why I'm not on this myself	
ezmobius	im just coming out of 10 years of doing web stuff and sick of it now	
but im good at it and know tons of good folks so this is a easy project for me to tackle and im scratchign my own itch here	
Kliment	Oh, another thing	
ezmobius	latest version of rubyonrails is based on a little framework i wrote for fun 	
http://rubyonrails.org/merb	
although they dont link to that page directly anywhere	
Kliment	It WOULD be cool if it were easy to replicate the entire thing, but said replication does not have to be live	
Oh that's who you are!	
ezmobius	ezra zygmuntowicz here yeah	
where are you locate Kliment	
?	
eu somewhere?	
Kliment	Germany	
ezmobius	cool	
Kliment	As you can see on my Rav page	
Rav is all Ruby	
ezmobius	i figured it was somewhere near there yeah	
yeah thats hwy i had heard of it before