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What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?

Key points:

  • Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
  • Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
  • 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
  • While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
  • 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: blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about

BroBot9000 ,
@BroBot9000@lemmy.world avatar

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.

bionicjoey ,

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

BroBot9000 ,
@BroBot9000@lemmy.world avatar

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.

lemmyvore ,

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.

BroBot9000 ,
@BroBot9000@lemmy.world avatar

Still introduces the concept and will make people aware of other instances.

Definitely avoid it but it’s still publicly for federation.

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Yep. I bet good money federation remains unidirectional and opt-in. All to pretend to comply with DMA, just like they are with WhatsApp.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Threads is federated though. You can follow Threads accounts on Mastodon. It’s still a work in progress though, and not everything is implemented yet.

Zos_Kia ,
@Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com avatar

Artists are perfectly able to use the fediverse, that is not what is stopping them.

They don’t come because they need to be where their fans are. That is why Cara will only be a splash: their niche is artists who place more value on the anti-AI slant than on meeting their audience where it lives. By definition that is not conducive to a lot of organic growth.

lanolinoil ,
@lanolinoil@lemmy.world avatar

…and for that reason, I’m out

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I wonder if any of the other sharks will make an offer

forgotaboutlaye ,

Gonna be a no from me dawg

QuarterSwede ,
@QuarterSwede@lemmy.world avatar

I didn’t even know what it was till yesterday. Not sure it’s the bastion of the public.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

You say that like this shit is hard to use.

bionicjoey ,

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

Prandom_returns ,

It’s good. It acts as a filter.

Psych ,

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 ?

Prandom_returns ,

I’m not gatekeeping anyone. Everyone’s welcome.

Psych ,

Well you do sound a lot like a gatekeeper for someone who isn’t gatekeeper .

Prandom_returns ,

Ah yes, gatekeeping with “Everyone’s welcome”. 🤡

Psych ,

Nice face .

Prandom_returns ,

Nice argument.

Psych ,

Tnx you too

Bahalex ,

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.

PopOfAfrica ,

The artist and nerd Venn diagram is practically a circle around my parts.

Omniraptor , (edited )

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

Wiz ,

Pixelfed is pretty damn easy.

Flaky , (edited )

I think the problem is both technical and cultural. I use both Mastodon and Bluesky pretty regularly, and am dipping my toes back into Lemmy after the instance I used has seemingly died. A lot of the technical and cultural problems the fediverse and specifically Mastodon - being the most well-known ActivityPub project - has, that made people flock to Bluesky instead (during a time when invite codes were needed, adding a layer of friction to joining Bluesky at the time), is well-documented on this post by Erin Kissane.

The tl;dr: fractured federation amongst other problems, and a very scoldy audience turned these people away from Mastodon.

Hell I consider myself a very techy nerd, but I moved Mastodon instances after being frustrated with the inherent lossiness of federation with ActivityPub on the Masto instance I used to be on, which sucks because the instance I was on had no other problems.

Gigasser ,

Might help to make tutorial vids for fediverse stuff.

small44 ,

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.

BroBot9000 ,
@BroBot9000@lemmy.world avatar

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.

elgordino ,

If they keep burning $100k/w on their Vercel bill they might not be around that long anyway!

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

If Pixelfed actually siloed itself into its own network it would make a lot of sense. As is, it’s chock full of pictures and text from Mastodon and other federated platforms that are not remotely artistic in nature.

The whole idea of IG, in it’s infancy, before being taken blatantly and completely off the rails by Meta, was to have photographers and artists and beautiful content.

On top of that, it’s just a copy-paste of IG, including all the dumb shit.

And on top of all of that, it lacks any of the copyright and AI protections that Cara is squarely aimed at.

AGreenPurple ,

The main problem with all the alternatives is for me (as a hobby photographer) the lack of models on these platforms. When looking for models, I find them on Instagram and no other platform. As with WhatsApp the majority of “normal” people have decided to use that, so if I’m telling them to contact me on Signal, they shy away from that (and stillI I refuse to use it as much as possible).

So looking at Signal, it’s free and very, very close to WhatsApp and yet still people don’t want to use that. Getting them to use pixel fed would be much, much harder.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

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.

BroBot9000 ,
@BroBot9000@lemmy.world avatar

There are multiple third party apps and the official versions are available in open beta. For both android and iOS.

pixelfed.org/mobile-apps

Prandom_returns ,

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.

Sabata11792 ,

Solves the problem for a few years until Meta buys their users and data back.

Murdoc ,

Assuming they don’t own them already as a sort of pressure valve. Yeah I’m getting that cynical.

General_Effort ,

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.

interdimensionalmeme ,

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

Grimy ,

According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.

ekZepp OP ,
@ekZepp@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    snooggums ,
    @snooggums@midwest.social avatar

    the property of Cara and/or the individual artist

    This seems worded to muddy the waters about who actually has the copyright.

    ScreaminOctopus ,

    Monetization plan might be to sell prints of platformed artists work, with out any need for pesky royalties.

    Grimy ,

    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.

    Bob1971 ,

    Ok, the lady behind Cara just WON a f-ing copywrite lawsuit against some dick that stole her artwork. I'm 100% sure the wording is so if you think about stealing from Cara, she will come after your ass with both guns blazing.

    Grimy ,

    Regardless, their terms of service let’s Cara not only sell prints and your artwork to third parties but also let’s them sell your artwork for AI training if they wanted to.

    Instagram for all it’s fault specifically says that they don’t own your artwork and only get a license to show it.

    I don’t really care what she won, people tend to cave really fast if given proper financial incentive.

    OsaErisXero ,

    No, it doesn't. It states that the copyrighted works are the property of Cara and/or the artist who created the Works, except where otherwise noted. This specifically would cover cases where someone attempts to claim that a Work they found on Cara isn't copyrighted because a copyright notice wasn't explicitly stated, and doesn't make explicit claims over the ownership of any arbitrary Work. For it to work in the way you're claiming, the "or" cannot be present as it being there implies the existence of Works on the site which Cara does not have property rights to. Who actually possesses the property rights to any given Work is left, apparently intentionally, ambiguous.

    General_Effort ,

    cases where someone attempts to claim that a Work they found on Cara isn’t copyrighted because a copyright notice wasn’t explicitly stated

    In what country is that a thing?

    OsaErisXero ,

    None that I'm aware of, but for a copyright to be asserted in the US a human must be associated with it as a consequence of the monkey selfie case. My reading is that this would cover the edge case of an anonymous, unknown poster submitting the work, allowing Cara to act as the default rights holder unless otherwise asserted by a person or user.

    Cringe2793 ,

    Why are you twisting it to make it seem like Cara is doing a good thing? What’s your motive? What is the difference between Cara owning it by default and the uploader owning it by default? Why can’t it just be the owners property?

    General_Effort ,

    It doesn’t work like that. The monkey selfie case did not set any kind of precedence. Animals cannot own property, including copyrights.

    For a work to be under copyright in the US, it has to be an “original work of authorship” and contain “a modicum of creativity”. Some countries allow broader copyrights. Photographs that are accidentally triggered are public domain. CCTV footage is a gray area. Setting up a camera and luring animals into triggering it, might produce copyrighted images. A court would have to decide if the individual circumstances constitute authorship and a modicum of creativity. An animal snagging a camera and triggering it certainly doesn’t. The monkey selfie case did nothing to advance the law.

    A public domain image is just that. Attempting to assert ownership over one is either an error or fraud. I don’t know what the US rules are when a rights-owner can’t be found. I doubt that you can just become the default owner of some property just by writing something on a website.

    xnx ,

    That’s not true

    Grimy ,

    ???

    The clause is literally a comment or so down and available on their website.

    samus12345 ,
    @samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

    I knew that C looked familiar!

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Cartoon_Network_2010_logo.svg/1200px-Cartoon_Network_2010_logo.svg.png

    SomethingBurger ,

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Open_Source_Initiative.svg/457px-Open_Source_Initiative.svg.png

    johannesvanderwhales ,

    They actually seem quite a bit different. The one for Cara isn’t perfectly round and seems to suggest a person in the middle.

    samus12345 ,
    @samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah, they’re different, but “white circular C on a black background” just made me think of the CN one.

    PopOfAfrica ,

    So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?

    MostlyGibberish ,

    Funny you should mention that.

    Hadriscus ,

    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”

    wagoner ,

    https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/042b44cc-69e5-4b33-85f7-a331f7b4745c.jpeg

    Dicska ,

    “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??”

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a0e22148-c796-4b8c-950c-dc86861c5135.jpeg

    Omniraptor ,

    I’ve heard from many ppl that vercel is pretty nasty that way, and to only use them for learning and toy projects.

    dan ,
    @dan@upvote.au avatar

    Twitter no longer loads newer tweets if you’re logged out. Instead of showing a proper message, it either fails to load or redirects to the login page. They did that to prevent scraping.

    jol ,

    So what happens now? I doubt they have figured monetization right?

    Evotech ,

    They basically have to just move off vercel. There’s a lot of other much cheaper alternatives though

    jol ,

    OK, but they have a 90k bill now?

    Evotech ,

    Can probably be massaged a bit

    jol ,

    Massaging costs extra though?

    UnderpantsWeevil ,
    @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    gedaliyah ,
    @gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    HootinNHollerin , (edited )

    The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed w it

    ams ,

    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…

    Mastema ,

    Is it federated and open source? If not, I’ll pass.

    CeeBee ,

    Pixelfed is the alternative we want

    5PACEBAR ,

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e290d40e-610d-455a-bec8-7d6d52b5c180.webp

    rolling_resistance ,

    Cara has no passwords: you log in via Google or Apple

    uhuh, no thanks

    KuroiKaze ,

    You have a problem with oauth?

    WanderingVentra ,

    A lot of people are trying to de-google.

    Rudgrcom ,

    you can use your email

    yamanii ,
    @yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

    So much bad faith, I logged in just fine with a regular e-mail.

    rolling_resistance ,

    It’s just a quote from the article, but good to know.

    Anafabula ,
    @Anafabula@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    David Revoy’s take

    Hadriscus ,

    Thanks for the link. This is pretty much what I expected.

    gedaliyah ,
    @gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    JeeBaiChow ,

    …until they decide to sell their company. Or their user data. Or the shareholders say so. Or…

    jadelord ,

    This will be the headline a month later:

    Cara’s monthly active users down to a few thousands. Here’s why.

    TheFeatureCreature ,
    @TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    pentagrammar ,

    They have huge bills to pay already. It can totally lead to enshittification.

    TheImpressiveX ,
    @TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml avatar

    Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

    grrgyle ,

    Sounds like another pan

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    🤷 all we have to do is keep moving faster than our waste stream.

    Platform has cool ideas, gets users, gets greedy, gets infected with bots and scammers, users leave for new platform with cool ideas…

    Accept the idea that you are not going to have a thirty year old Yahoo Answers account and even if you did you won’t be using it, and make peace with it.

    grrgyle , (edited )

    This exactly. And also the more splintered similar user bases are, the better

    More competition, less easy to enshittify a “captured” user base

    Nighed ,
    @Nighed@sffa.community avatar

    What is their monetisation plan? Currently they don’t seem to have anything other than donations?

    Prandom_returns ,

    What’s a “plan”?

    Schal330 ,

    You’ll have to ask the company that eventually buys them out!

    afraid_of_zombies ,

    I did and they said selling user data, promoting certain content, targeted ads, superchats, and a checkmark thing that costs five dollars a month that only 4 people get.

    vodkasolution ,

    I’m no federated-nazi and I welcome projects like Cara, but at the beginning there are always lots of subscriptions

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