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.
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.
If they keep burning $100k/w on their Vercel bill they might not be around that long anyway!
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.
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.
https://pixelfed.org/mobile-apps
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
Idk I hear misskey (activity pub micro blogging software) is really big in Japan, used by lots of artists. lots of Japanese users on bluesky as well
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.
Yep. I bet good money federation remains unidirectional and opt-in. All to pretend to comply with DMA, just like they are with WhatsApp.
Still introduces the concept and will make people aware of other instances.
Definitely avoid it but it’s still publicly for federation.
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.
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.
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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
It’s good. It acts as a filter.
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.
Pixelfed is pretty damn easy.