What we're replacing

3dprint-hive is a marketplace for prints. The print is what you order. The source files behind it are open -- you can read them, fork them, audit them -- but the thing in your cart is still a physical object that someone will make and ship to you.

Online shopping made one trade-off look inevitable: surrender your name, address, and purchase history to a handful of platforms in exchange for stuff arriving at your door. For mass-produced goods, the warehouses are real. For things any home machine can make, the warehouses are not real -- they exist only because the platform built them to extract data.

How a print works here

A print has two parts: the source (open files, hosted in a tracked repo) and the offers (presses promising to fabricate it in a specific material at a specific price range, with a specific lead time). You pick the print, then you pick whose press makes it. The source is the same for everyone; the offers compete.

Price varies with quality. A press publishes a range -- draft for a quick, cheap profile, standard for their default. Buyers pick the quality they want at order time and pay accordingly.

Anyone with a machine can open a press. Many presses can offer the same print -- different filaments, different countries, different turnaround. If one press disappears, the print is not lost; the others are still making it.

Anonymous by default

Every account is a random handle and a secret token. No email, no name, no recovery, no link back to you. Lose the token and the handle stays standing but becomes unmanageable; its prints keep serving. That's the privacy bargain.

Shipping is the unavoidable leak: a press handling your order needs an address. That address goes only to the specific press you chose -- never to the platform's public surfaces, never to a global index. v0.3 encrypts it client-side to the press's pubkey before it leaves your browser.

Why a hive

Because there is no central manufacturer. Every press is independent. Decentralising the machines -- not just the digital identity -- is the point.