On July 14th 2026, Julian Chandra — now-former CEO of Odysee — posted this1:

I know most aren’t privy to the intricacies of C-level parlance, but generally when you step down from your position, you have a replacement lined up, you usher them in, and you talk the company up.

What is not common for execs who have faith in the continued success of the company is for them to write something like:

I’d be doing the community a major disservice if I didn’t say plainly that […] the path ahead looks very bleak.

That says something like “I’m abandoning this ship”.

As a core member of a community whose publishing revolves around Odysee, I do not enjoy seeing preemptive eulogies on my timeline.

Is Odysee Dying?

I don’t know.

It’s complicated.

Some background: Odysee was bought a while back by Forward Research after SEC litigation with LBRY hit the floor. Forward’s goal was simple: LBRY died as a chain in terms of popularity and relevance, so they wanted to move it over to Arweave2.

From what I can tell, that project was going “okay” up until recently. Funding from Forward is now in question, and the Arweave move is in jeopardy.

My guess is that Julian no longer has any faith in it. Which isn’t good.

Odysee’s future is now uncertain and unsteady. There is enough risk in banking on its sturdiness that we should consider resilience.

What Do We Do?

The best time to make backups was yesterday, the second best time is today, and the worst time is when you realize you need them.

I haven’t been sitting on my hands for weeks on end. You may’ve seen me post about recruiting a closed seed pool for a liferaft:

That raft is afloat. As of this article, we now have infrastructure to not only ensure that all of guncad is mirrored from Odysee to torrents, but that you can stay up-to-date via RSS, ensuring resilience over time.

Torrents on GunCAD Index

If you’re reading this, torrents offered by that mirroring effort are now live. You can find them all over the website. Please seed them to ensure they stay available.

These torrents are verified by GunCAD Index to be identical to the files you would get from Odysee3.

If you would like to help contribute to the seed pool in bulk, click “Seed the Index” on the frontpage:

That’ll bring up a small modal that’ll guide you through the process. Reach out if you have questions that the guide can’t answer.

So GunCAD Index Offers Downloads Now?

No.

GunCAD Index still does not distribute any gun design files. It does not participate in the seeder pool, it does not participate in mirroring, and this will not change for the foreseeable future.

Contributions for torrents come from a very small closed pool of submitters and are independently-verified on the Index side.

It is very important to me that not only are files owned by the community, but that they are served independently of the index used to find them.

Why Not LBRY?

Why torrents? Wasn’t LBRY supposed to handle this? Why’d we use the funny blockchain thing that was supposed to solve this single-point-of-failure problem if it doesn’t do that?

-You, probably

The short answer is that the SEC killed all aspirations of that when they grabbed LBRY’s dick and twisted it. It was just kinda hard to tell at the time.

Several LBRY features rely on Odysee to function because community support is so spotty:

• Almost all tools are pointed at Odysee services4

• Donating disk space is needlessly difficult and takes special software

• Nobody mines the coin5

In theory, one could recruit a bunch of miners and run all this infrastructure, but the bottom line is that Odysee is proving in realtime that that’s not a sustainable business venture.

Torrents, instead, are very boring and have been proven to work over decades.

Where Will We Go if Odysee Dies?

Backups are well and good, but that doesn’t solve publication.

This does:

If Odysee ever goes under and we don’t have a new hosting platform lined up, the Index will start taking native torrent submissions. Pitfalls to this will be discussed if they’re ever relevant.

In the event that we do all agree on a new service to use, I’ll wire support for it up to the Index instead.

How Can I Help?

There are a lot of ways you can help with this backup effort:

• Do not abandon Odysee. Releases posted there will continue to be backed up for you automatically. There is currently no better platform, and if ever there were a time they’d need support, it’d be now.

• If you are a designer, sign up for an account on GunCAD Index and claim your channel. If Odysee ever dies, I’m not gonna have any way to figure out who’s really who post-facto. The account verification process currently proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re you. Go do that now.

• If you have disk space and bandwidth, seed the Index. There’s a big button on the frontpage. If you’re limited on disk space, pick a search query you like (verified:true is a good one) and seed just that one query instead. Make sure your client is subscribed to the RSS feed, otherwise you could slowly drift out of sync from the index and leave gaps in coverage.

• If you don’t already know how to, figure out how to use a torrent client. I suggest qBittorrent. It’s not hard, it’s documented in a billion places.

And most importantly:

• Print a fucking gun. Show people that they’re cool and safe and can do things that normal gun manufacturers are too scared to do. Show off printed cans and fun cheap stocks and shit that you own top-to-bottom. In a future where we own nothing, making is everything.

Happy early 250th, Lady Liberty! To celebrate, here’s the latest from the labs of GunCAD Index.

We’re rolling 1.12’s changes into this release post too. They tie together. Big themes this time around are:

• A heavier focus on release verification

• Adding a channel directory

• Tons of tiny UI nitpicks fixed

New Release Cards

Probably the most visible change to new users: the card template for releases has been changed. It now more prominently displays the author and moves tons of info out of the thumbnail and into the card body, such as popularity stats and the platform it was posted on.

In order to make this useful, much less possible, I had to overhaul the whole tag subsystem. Tags are now filtered and reordered specifically when presented in cards, which means the shorter space the tag strip has will now be used more adequately and, if I tuned this well, help you immediately identify what something is more consistently.

Gone are the days of a wall full of useless “CC-BY-NC-SA” license tags occluding the more useful ones.

The details page of a release will still display all of the related platform’s stats, including likes/dislikes/stars/makes/etc.

Verification

Automatic Verification

We now automatically add a variant of the Index’s verification seal if we can meet some basic checks that look like a release will have docs, source files, and meshes. It’s not weighted as heavily as the green one for popularity, but it should help you weed out releases that obviously don’t have docs.

Tiers of Verification

There are now three tiers of badge:

• Copper - Automatically-verified stuff based on heuristics

• Green - Manually-verified stuff with tighter restrictions

• Gold - Stuff that’s way, way above the rest

All of them can be filtered for via the verified: search filter.

Plain English

Clicking on verification badges and little “what’s this” indicators for them around the site will now bring up a modal about what the seal means instead of quietly assuming you’ll navigate all the way to the back of the site to find the explanation buried in the bottom of the FAQ.

You can also navigate straight to searches for the various tiers from here.

Channels

I won’t spoil a thing about this one. Just go visit the site, see for yourself. All the places that you’d expect would link to channel detail pages will now actually do so instead of just doing a filtered search.

Lightning Round

Backend changes:

• Timezone awareness and a few randomized elements are now handled in Javascript. Apologies noscript users, but this change was required to make Cloudflare able to cache anonymous page views, which helps tons with responsiveness

• We now use Umami for analytics on the backend instead of a bunch of bootlegged Prometheus gauges and queries. Umami respects the do-not-track flag sent by your browser. Data is kept on GunCAD Index infrastructure and not sent to third parties

UX tweaks:

• added spinny rrat ehehe

• Color contrast algo is now more well-behaved

• The hero video has been compressed by ~15x

• Detail views on desktop now move the description to the right of the metadata to make better use of negative space

• There’s now a trail of breadcrumbs right below the navbar as you navigate the site, letting you quickly return to your search and share that search with others while linking to detail views

• Build cards and detail views have been overhauled to be easier to parse and line up with new release detail views

Other shit:

• Inbound and outbound disclaimers are now synced and configured at runtime

• The Discover page has now been completely removed in favor of the richer landing page. It redirects to the site root now

• Tag system was overhauled

  • Certain tags are now hidden in certain contexts, like on release cards and in the tag vote view (you can no longer correct automatically-detected license tags because those are always mechanically-assigned)

  • Tag reordering now has a priority system for relevance. You’ll now see a domain-specific type, then a general type, then platforms, then other categories (so an FRT should always wind up displaying “FRT, Accessory, AR-15…” or similar instead of “CC-BY-SA, AR-15, 5.56x45mm…”)

Go Visit the Index

Go build a gun:

https://guncadindex.com

And patronize our sponsors, too — they keep the lights on:

https://guncadindex.com/vendors/all

It’s only been a week since the last update post, but this one deserves its own article. The Index has yet again received a major update, this time in the form of robust search filtering syntax.

You now have way more useful tools to find what you’re looking for.

These new tools supplement the fuzzy text search, they do not replace it. All of your old queries and search flows will still work fine.

Patches are Sold Out

If you were looking at picking up one of the , you’ve officially missed the bus. Thank you very much to everyone who purchased a patch and supported both us and our friends at Cultivated Laser!

Now go out, show them off, and get people to print a gun. They will do you no good just sitting around!

New Search Syntax

This update adds an intuitive but powerful new search syntax to the website to supplement the fuzzy text searching that’s proven so helpful this past year. With it, you can add filters and sorts for all sorts of properties of releases. Add a minimum size, a maximum age, hide tags, include other tags, and more.

See some examples and the full documentation here.

You’ll be offered example queries as you browse the site to help you learn the ropes.

At its core: boolean expressions.

Boolean Expressions

I just saw your eyes glaze over. It’s not complicated, trust me. I’ll walk you through it, and if you’re still confused by the end, pay it no mind and just keep searching how you always have.

Say you’re cruising the site, right, and getting tired of seeing shittons of Glocks. You have a thought:

I want to hide all Glocks that aren’t PCCs

You don’t wanna see handguns, but still want to see stuff like the Pillager. Rethink your wish in terms of data that the Index actually has:

I want to hide all releases with the Glock tag but not the PCC/Rifle tags

And now we do the “boolean” part, which is just a word that means you need to phrase it in terms of groups, ANDs and ORs.

Exclude all releases that have the Glock tag AND NOT either the PCC or Rifle tags

Cut the fluffy parts of English out:

Exclude (Glock tag and not (PCC tag or Rifle tag))

And now we’re close enough to the search’s actual syntax that you can just substitute things:

NOT (tag:glock AND NOT (tag:pcc OR tag:rifle))

That’s a valid query. You can go run that. You can also use symbols once you get the swing of things to save on time:

-(tag:glock&-(tag:pcc|tag:rifle))

With boolean filtering, you can make tons of picky search queries:

• Show me all ARs and Glocks by this channel

  • (tag:ar-15|tag:glock) channel:someguy

• Give me every 10mm handgun within this date range

  • released>2025-01-01 released<2025-01-30 tag:10mm-auto tag:handgun

• Show me every piece of furniture for an AR that isn’t a pistol grip

  • tag:ar-15 tag:furniture -tag:pistol-grip

• Most popular glocks that aren’t chairmanwon glocks

  • tag:glock -channel:"@chairmanwon:a" sort:popular

• All completely DIY guns from the past year under an open-source license and all of Laffs’ knives that’re under a megabyte in size

  • (tag:diy-everything released>2025-05-14 tag:remixable tag:sharable tag:22lr) OR (channel:"@FFFTech:3" tag:bladed-weapon size<1MB)

And also really simple ones:

• Exclude autosears

  • -tag:auto-sear

• Show me just 9mm Glocks

  • tag:9x19mm tag:glock

And, of course, you can then use the fuzzy text search with them:

• Orca stuff released by anyone in the past two years

  • orca released>2024-05-14

Tag Directory

With this new search syntax comes an increasing emphasis on tagging. Tags are now a first-class citizen and shown in the sidebar.

The Tag Directory is how you browse them, and it can:

• Search through tags

• Copy tags to your clipboard

• Add them to your search query automagically

It’s way more powerful than the old “advanced search” page we used to have. Give it a look.

Other Stuff

Lightning round of bugfixes and miscellanea:

• Long search queries no longer flow weird

• Builds’ “posted” dates are now when they’re approved by a moderator, helping rankings a bit

• The background is now static

• You’ll find search nudges and links all around the site

• Performance improvements

• Tons of tiny tweaks and fixes not worth mentioning here

Go Visit the Index

Go build a gun:

https://guncadindex.com

And patronize our sponsors, too — they keep the lights on:

https://guncadindex.com/vendors/all

Subscribe now

This release of the Index brings you a very fun new feature: builds.

Builds are a way for you to show off a completed gun to the community, linking it to any number of releases on the Index and maybe even landing on the front page for a day or two.

Submissions are anonymous unless you put your name in the description.

GunCAD Index Patch

We’ll get to the update in a sec, but first, there are fewer than 20 patches left of the collab between us and Cultivated Laser. These things are hardly two days old and I doubt they’re gonna be up for much longer.

If you want a high-quality, laser-cut velcro patch to rep at the range and events, there is no better an option. A cut of all sales will directly support the GunCAD Index.

Get them before they’re gone, and maybe pick up another patch, magazine, or cup to go with it: https://guncad.link/patch

Browsing Builds

Over on the sidebar (or in the drawer on mobile) there’s now a shiny new button:

This’ll take you to the build list page:

On this page, there are three sort options and a big blue “Submit” button. They do what you think they do.

Click a build and you can see details:

This includes up to four high-resolution images, a detailed description, and all the releases linked to it.

Submitting a Build

Hitting the Submit button takes you to a form:

You can upload a handful of images, link it to a bunch of releases, add a rich description (seriously, go wild, give it as much detail as you can), and rate the build’s difficulty. The rest you can figure out by visiting the site — not gonna rehash all the details here.

You cannot edit this later, so make sure you get the details right the first time. Use the preview button to make sure your markdown is correct:

Deleting Builds

“But Shit, if all the submissions are anonymous, how can I take my post down if I need to?”

Same way it’s done on imageboards: via a password. You provide one at upload time and can use it to nuke the post later. This is the most privacy-conscious way I could implement this.

Only its salted hash is stored in our database, but you should still use a unique password.

Why Add Builds?

For those who’ve only joined in the past few months: back in September we lost a long-running subreddit called /r/fosscad. The two biggest things people bemoaned were:

• The loss of all the tribal knowledge, which we were able to recover and preserve over on Lemmy; and

• The loss of a place to doomscroll builds for inspiration

The former has been addressed, but the latter maybe a bit less so. We have another subreddit — /r/3d2a — but it’s very clear that reddit doesn’t want us there as they will randomly smite builds for no reason.1

So I shoved it into the Index.

The choice was thought-out. It comes with some serious upsides as part of being able to richly link builds and releases:

• The front page can now show you cool stuff that people have made in addition to new releases

• When you’re contemplating a release, you can see others’ builds of it

• If you find a cool build, it can immediately link you to all of its components

Feature Rollup

A lot of features and fixes have landed since the 1.8.0 post. Big things:

• You can now browse ZIPs before you download. This was also wired into our auto-tagging, so the tags for “has dev files” and “has gcode” are much more consistent

• There’s now a rotating carousel of news items on the front page. If you have something you want displayed there, ping me — it’s for the community

Small things:

• Page flashes on load were minimized by retooling our stylesheets a bit

• Autofocus of the search bar was removed

• Various styling consistency fixes

• Small optimizations in import chains

• Bunch of new tags

Go Visit the Index

Go build a fucking gun:

https://guncadindex.com

Spread the signal with a patch:

https://guncad.link/patch

And patronize our other sponsors, too — they keep the lights on:

https://guncadindex.com/vendors/all

Subscribe now

In keeping with the theme of making long-term architectural decisions, I’ve completely overhauled the styling of the GunCAD Index.

Before you read this post, you should go have a look for yourself. Browse around!

“But Shittinator”, you ask, “why? Didn’t it look just fine before?”

Two things:

1. No it looked like dogass, idiot; and

2. The goal here wasn’t just to make it look better.

The styling overhaul just kinda happened as a natural consequence of moving to Tailwind and daisyUI, which are proper UI frameworks. I ripped out all my old styles and built the site up from scratch with a better understanding of where it was going and what I wanted out of it.

You should see some much tighter styling all across the website and way better mobile usability.

Let’s tour through it, shall we?

Reporting Issues

Before we get into this, I want to mention that I am but one man, and as thoroughly as I tested this and as much as I avoided hacks, I cannot account for all devices.

If you see bugs in these new themes, please report them! There is contact information in the footer of the site, and the comment section here works just as well.

Onto the stuff:

It Looks Fuckin’ Cool

Just go have a look. I am almost definitely biased, but words do it no justice.

https://guncadindex.com

Much Better Navigation

Question: what’s the single most important interactive part of a search engine?

If you said “the search bar”, you’d be correct!

Now why the fuck hasn’t it been on every page this whole time? Well, the answer is that it’s very difficult to make it work well without tons of utility classes to glue together and reference implementations. If you have those, it’s not too hard.

I, for the longest time, did not have those. I do now.

Of course, in order to move the search bar into the main site nav, I had to put the links somewhere else. On desktop, those’ll be in an icons-only drawer on the left (if you hover over the icons you can see links — there aren’t that many and they should hopefully all be intuitive). On mobile, this drawer collapses…

…into a little menu:

Super clean, way more usable on every device.

Improved Searching

The previous search flow was fairly clunky, requiring you to head to an “advanced” page that just laid a bunch of checkboxes out for each tag you wanna add.

Instead, the whole search form is always available on every page in the navbar. You hit the little settings and tag buttons, you get more options.

Additionally, we leverage templates a bit heavier to give you amenities like “clear all tags” without any scripting:

Also touched a couple things up with how we display your search query. You should see richer embedded cards on other websites that actually show the whole query, and that same string in the main search results page:

Should come in handy for when you get 0 results and realize you’re filtering by a channel or something.

Light Mode

I’m not sorry about April 1st. It was funny.

I am sorry about this.

If, for whatever reason, you decide your eyeballs need more screen backlight, you can toggle Light Mode by hitting the button in the corner. Support for this theme will be somewhat limited unless I see a large number of you using it — I can’t guarantee things like vendor graphics will contrast quite right.

It came free with the toolkit and I use it for debugging colors.

Go Visit the Index

Go print a fucking gun:

https://guncadindex.com

And patronize our sponsors, too — they keep the lights on:

https://guncadindex.com/vendors/all

Subscribe now

Hello readers! From now on, this will be the authoritative outlet for all updates on GunCAD Index. Subscribe to this Substack. Do it.

For those unfamiliar, I’m The Shittinator, and I’m the developer and administrator of the GunCAD Index, a search engine for 3D-printable guns and accessories. We don’t offer direct downloads, instead opting to spider the filehosting sites where users upload their designs.

If you’ve ever been curious about printing guns, the legality of it, where to get started, or where to get in touch with the community, stop by and visit the wiki — the front page alone will get you oriented. And feel free to reach out to me if you have questions.

Anyway, got a big site update this time around. Let’s dive into it!

The Cool Stuff

Happy Birthday to the FGC-9 MkI

Link here. On this day, six years ago, the original FGC-9 was released and made history. Most people are more familiar with the MkII, but make no mistake: the MkI did accomplish its goals of open-sourcing a design hard enough to Fuck Gun Control.

Support for Printables

This took a surprising amount of effort. But we’re here.

We now index and expose Printables models.

I’ve done a lot of work making sure that we rope in as little unrelated crap as possible and only pull in gun-related useful stuff. The results?

• Mag extensions

• Tons of reloading-related equipment

• Snap caps and chamber flags

• Ammo storage

• And more…

You can identify which platform a release came from based on the little flag right next to the channel:

You can filter for/against particular platforms using the leftmost drop-down box underneath the search bar. I know this is bound to be just noise for some searches, so use that lever as appropriate.

Some notes:

• Obviously this is no replacement to Odysee. Guns should still be posted on platforms that tolerate guns and are resilient, not on sites like Printables

• GunCAD Mirror does not currently back these releases up. I’ll have to do a similar refactor over there, though it should be a lot easier because the codebase is smaller

• Filesize might be a bit off — it’s the sum of all models’ sizes, not the size of the compressed ZIP you get when you hit “download all models”.

Explore around. And let me know if there’s cool shit on Printables that we’re not picking up so I can edit our search queries.

Oh, and it should go without saying: put “guncad” in the tags of all your Printables releases if you wanna for-sure show up on the Index.

Axing All Geoblocks

As a configuration change this update, I’ll be disabling all geoblocking.

The original intent with geoblocking California was to avoid getting dragged into the suit against The Gatalog and co. But since then, several other states have passed similar laws with varying numbers of rows of teeth, and what was intended to insulate me from one very specific lawsuit has spiraled into me becoming complicit in a gun control scheme.

My rationale at the time was that my time and energy would be way better spent developing a good, open-source website and that I should insulate myself from risk.

But I overlooked something really important: the Index has grown beyond being just some toy project, and it must have a spine.

The Index’s official stance on AB1263 and similar laws is simple:

• We do not distribute files. We have never distributed files. We will never distribute files. We are a company that makes and hosts an open-source domain-specific search engine.

• Extrajudicial enforcement of state law is unconstitutional. You cannot legislate the internet the way CA asserts that it can.

• Restricting access to gun designs violates the First and Second Amendments and is unconstitutional.

• We have you confirm that you are legally allowed to consume this content when you enter and when you leave for a platform. You cannot move from the Index to a site that hosts design files without attesting that you know your legal situation and are not committing a felony. We are not responsible for you deciding to commit a crime.

Geoblocking rules will be purged within 24 hours of this release announcement.

(Disclaimer: none of the above is to be construed as approval of felonious behavior. The GunCAD Index does not want you to do something stupid and get put in assrape prison. Be smart. It’s real hard to organize calls to your representatives when people are in concrete boxes.)

Banners

Are you a release group that wants to bolster recruitment? An indie dev who would appreciate a beer for your trouble? Some other third thing?

Well, the Index now affords devs rich banner space under each of their releases for this purpose.

Reach out to me requesting to add a banner for your channel/channels and we’ll get something sorted out. You get control of a logo on the left, some description text, and a destination URL.

Additionally, you may see sponsored listings in this banner space. These sponsored listings will be for relevant parts and kits using the Index’s discount codes and referral links. This’ll support the Index while helping you guys discover deals more easily.

Nerd Shit

Warning: here be jargon.

Complete Decoupling from LBRY

I’ve spoken about this a few times, but the site has historically been closely tied to LBRY. Tons and tons of templates and model fields all assumed we’d have LBRY-related data, like claim IDs, the stream descriptor hash, the shape of Odysee’s metrics, the concept of abandonment, etc. This has all been ripped away.

Now we instead have a generic “Release” object and a “ReleaseOrigin” object. The former holds platform-independent data like the name, the description, and the channel that released it. The latter is much more interesting:

ReleaseOrigin objects have a “platform” field that associates them with a given website. We implement an adapter for that platform that implements some common functions, handles metadata, figures out a good popularity scoring algorithm, and provides download links:

This abstraction wasn’t done for just Printables, of course. No, it speeds up the implementation and adaptation of any platform. On the TODO list, in no particular order:

• Makerworld

• Thingiverse

• GitHub

• GESTALT (Whoops that’s not a thing yet)

We do still need some common fields from platforms, but they’re all reasonable things to expect.

API Changes

This new schema must naturally come with some API changes. Here’s the short of it:

• The legacy /api/releases family of endpoints now redirects to /api/v1/releases transparently.

• /api/v1 will ONLY show Odysee/LBRY content, and in the old schema shape which does not reflect the current split of Release and ReleaseOrigin

• /api/v2 will show ALL content from all platforms. It contains platform-specific data in origin.extra.

Developers are encouraged to migrate to the v2 API as it shows more content. The v1 API is likely to stick around for some time, though.

For Self-Hosters

I know there are a few of you out there who self-host the Index, so here’s a corner dedicated to this update. Big things:

• There’s now in-app configuration. See the “Site configuration” section of the admin interface. It’ll let you set the site icon, among other things

• Pay attention to UPGRADING.md to avoid inconsistent state and failed RQ jobs. If you just take the whole stack down for a sec, you’ll be fine.

• Thanks to Vega, you can now wire up GunCAD Mirror into your instance to offer direct download links. The production instance at guncadindex.com will not enable this feature, but you can do it at home for easy browsing.

Closing Notes

You skipped right to the end, fuckass, I know it. Fine:

• Printables, soon we’ll index more sites

• Geoblocking is gone

• Banners under releases; if you’re a dev or a beta manager shoot me a ping

• API changes

• You can hook GunCAD Index back to GunCAD Mirror if you want

• The FGC-9 was released six years ago today

Now go print a gun.

https://guncadindex.com

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