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: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about

244 points

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.

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90 points

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

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74 points

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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5 points

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

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5 points

…and for that reason, I’m out

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32 points

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.

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19 points

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.

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10 points

You say that like this shit is hard to use.

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15 points

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

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9 points

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

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9 points
*

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

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5 points

Pixelfed is pretty damn easy.

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2 points
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Deleted by creator
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1 point
*

Might help to make tutorial vids for fediverse stuff.

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17 points

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.

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18 points

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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11 points
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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.

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6 points

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

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3 points

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.

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3 points

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

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0 points

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.

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133 points

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.

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55 points

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

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18 points

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

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16 points

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.

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2 points

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

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70 points

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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9 points

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.

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20 points
*

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.

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5 points

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.

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6 points

That’s not true

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5 points

???

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

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1 point
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Deleted by creator
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35 points

the property of Cara and/or the individual artist

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

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12 points

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

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17 points

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.

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53 points

I knew that C looked familiar!

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32 points

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10 points

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

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4 points

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

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41 points

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.

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

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9 points

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…

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