Key points:
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Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
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Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
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Cara’s Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a ‘Portfolio’ feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
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While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
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Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI
more about: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
Join Pixelfed instead!
Cara is just another fucking centralized social media that’s gonna get run to the ground the moment they can monetize their user base.
Artists are mostly not going to figure out the fediverse. There really needs to be some kind of way of accessing it that is more layman friendly if we ever want it to be adopted by non-nerds
It’s really not that complicated and with shit like Threads, companies are introducing the concept to the masses while the enshittification of Instagram and the like will force people to look for alternatives.
We need to welcome people with open arms and not push them away the moment someone has a question about how federation works.
Threads is only federated in name. It’s simply Meta’s taking advantage of Twitter’s downfall. It’s as centralized and under Meta’s thumb as they come.
Still introduces the concept and will make people aware of other instances.
Definitely avoid it but it’s still publicly for federation.
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The artist and nerd Venn diagram is practically a circle around my parts.
Idk I hear misskey (activitypub micro blogging software, compatible but distinct from mastodon) is really big in Japan, used by lots of artists. lots of Japanese users on bluesky as well
You say that like this shit is hard to use.
Nah. But anything more complicated than a MacBook scares most people away. Most people aren’t down with anything that isn’t a turnkey experience
Most of these artists use fairly complicated, or difficult to master, software to create and/or edit their art.
Signing up for and uploading images to a website isn’t really complicated.
It’s good. It acts as a filter.
If only there were a filter to filter out gatekeepers like you . You do know your sabotaging your favorite platforms by being like this right ?
I’m not gatekeeping anyone. Everyone’s welcome.
Well you do sound a lot like a gatekeeper for someone who isn’t gatekeeper .
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Might help to make tutorial vids for fediverse stuff.
Cara is popular because of it’s anti ai stance. They have a detector to not allow ai images to be on the platform. Pixelfed allows it and also lack active users that are not artists.
For now.
Ai support or not it will still be aggressively monetized the moment enough users are locked in.
Fomo is a hell of a drug eh.
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If they keep burning $100k/w on their Vercel bill they might not be around that long anyway!
I tried but there is no app for it.
Fdroid has pixeldroid which is apparently incompatible with my android 12 phone?
The pixelfed app isn’t downloadable on Fdroid and is only available for “pre-download” on the play store.
I couldn’t find out how to access pixelfed through a mastodon app.
If it isn’t easily accessible through mobile, it simply won’t be picked up.
There are multiple third party apps and the official versions are available in open beta. For both android and iOS.
Yet another centralised social network. That pinky-promises they’ll never go bad.
Join now! Bring your friends! No ads! Everything’s free! We’re indie!..
Moments later… enshitification ensues.
Does it seem odd… This is a crowd that is all about “hands off muh property”. And yet they see nothing suspicious about someone giving them a free service.
Yep, this is just instagram again with a little anti ai image filter on top. And a portfolio, not a photo album !
If it’s not as interoperable as email, it belongs in the trash
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.
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Why did you specifically not put in bold this part and are the property of Cara. Clearly you saw it off you took the time to avoid putting stars around it.
I knew that C looked familiar!
They actually seem quite a bit different. The one for Cara isn’t perfectly round and seems to suggest a person in the middle.
Yeah, they’re different, but “white circular C on a black background” just made me think of the CN one.
So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?
Re: the hosting company
Your account does not appear to have spend management enabled, which would allow you to pause your project entirely if you hit a certain level of spend.
So, this is something of a devil’s bargain. Either shut down your website just as it’s catching fire and gaining traction. Or get billed a year’s server budget in a matter of days because of exploding costs.
In a saner world, this might be used as an argument for treating the Internet as a public utility and not a for-profit rent. Perhaps more companies could grow and sustain large pools of customers if they weren’t kneecapped by their own momentum.
Instead, I’m sure we’re going to see more exotic insurance and finance services designed to siphon money out of websites as a hedge against unexpected growth.
Do you mind telling what this says ? it seems Firefox doesn’t load twitter anymore. Or maybe you need an account ? I’m not sure, but it says “error”
“Jingna Zhang @ cara.app/zemotion @zemotion So freaking speechless right now. Seen many @vercel functions stories but first time experiencing such discrepancy vs request logs like, this is cannot be real??”
I’ve heard from many ppl that vercel is pretty nasty that way, and to only use them for learning and toy projects.
So what happens now? I doubt they have figured monetization right?
They basically have to just move off vercel. There’s a lot of other much cheaper alternatives though
OK, but they have a 90k bill now?
Can probably be massaged a bit
Massaging costs extra though?
Pixelfed looks like they are doing a huge push to get up to speed. It has been an immature app/platform for a long time and slow to get the features that people need from a photo sharing social media.
According to their mastodon, they are working for better AI management features, and launching an app that will make it a genuinely positive experience.
The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed w it
I really want Pixelfed to take off and this really could have been a moment, but after using it for more than a year now, I just can’t see it. Development is very slow - it feels like a one-man show (it might not be). We do need an alternative to Instagram, but yeah…
Is it federated and open source? If not, I’ll pass.
Pixelfed is the alternative we want
the crowdfunding/patronage of this platform only helps them build their proprietary empire. It’s like giving money to your neighbor who wants to build a swimming pool on their property because they promise you’ll be able to swim in it.
Thanks for the link. This is pretty much what I expected.
…until they decide to sell their company. Or their user data. Or the shareholders say so. Or…
This will be the headline a month later:
Cara’s monthly active users down to a few thousands. Here’s why.
I’ll be watching this curiously from a safe distance for now. I am interested in a new platform without AI, but this stinks of early-stage enshitification.
They have huge bills to pay already. It can totally lead to enshittification.
Cara has no passwords: you log in via Google or Apple
uhuh, no thanks
So much bad faith, I logged in just fine with a regular e-mail.
It’s just a quote from the article, but good to know.
you can use your email
You have a problem with oauth?
A lot of people are trying to de-google.
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Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
This is why twitter will never die.
Isn’t there already artstation.com? Just had a look at Cara and it looks very similar
Its Instagram mashed up with artstation
There was anti-AI art campaign a few months back by Artstation user due to Artstation allowing them.
