This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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??"
Is it federated and open source? If not, I'll pass.
Pixelfed is the alternative we want
...until they decide to sell their company. Or their user data. Or the shareholders say so. Or...
Cara has no passwords: you log in via Google or Apple
uhuh, no thanks
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.
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.
What is their monetisation plan? Currently they don't seem to have anything other than donations?
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.
