What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?
What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?
Everything you need to know about the AI-free social media platform for artists.
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
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.
Solves the problem for a few years until Meta buys their users and data back.
Assuming they don't own them already as a sort of pressure valve. Yeah I'm getting that cynical.
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.
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn't seem very artist friendly to me.
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.
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.
That’s not true
???
The clause is literally a comment or so down and available on their website.
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.
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.
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..
The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed w it
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.
Is it federated and open source? If not, I'll pass.
Pixelfed is the alternative we want
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.
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.
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.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Sounds like another pan
🤷 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.
This will be the headline a month later:
Cara's monthly active users down to a few thousands. Here's why.
What is their monetisation plan? Currently they don't seem to have anything other than donations?
You'll have to ask the company that eventually buys them out!
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.
What's a "plan"?
I'm no federated-nazi and I welcome projects like Cara, but at the beginning there are always lots of subscriptions
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.
Who. The fuck. Cares