A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch
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Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.
Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point
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These people should create an instance on Pixelfed, a libre alternative to Instagram.
I think it would be great for new social things like this to just speak ActivityPub. They can build up their own user experience and culture while joining a larger network. I don't have a problem with the software itself being non-free if the protocols are and they commit to supporting account migration.
Pixelfed already does support the image import from Instagram.
Mastodon doesn't seem to support any import from Twitter/X.
I'm assuming account migration from the main social media platforms to be an important feature.
But I don't think supporting ALL social media is realistic unless they all follow the same norms. Which I really doubt.
ActivityPub supports alsoKnownAs and movedTo so that users can migrate their social graphs to a different server or software. Of course that doesn't work for migrating from networks that don't support ActivityPub.
Content import is a separate issue, but I can imagine it being helpful as well.
The annoying thing with ActivityPub is that your username/handle is tightly coupled to a particular server, and moving server requires you to change your handle. Everywhere you've mentioned/documented your old handle is now out of date.
Bluesky handles this a lot better. If you own a domain, you can use it with any Bluesky server by creating a TXT record for validation. Your username is the domain name - if you own
example.com, you can be@example.comon Bluesky, without having to self-host it. If you move server, you don't have to change your username. Currently there's just one main Bluesky server but they plan to introduce federation at some point, and their protocol is already mostly designed for it.And the losing server has to cooperate, which is why I mentioned the commitment to support migrating away.
ATProto/Bluesky has some interesting ideas, and I'm interested to see how that develops as third parties start supporting the protocol. For a new service launching now, I think ActivityPub is the more important protocol to support, but it's presumably possible to support both.
Don't focus on specific apps or you will start all over again from the beginning when every new piece of anti-libre software, malware, appears.
People chose Cara because they identify with the art aspect of this social network. They don't care if it's anti-libre. They probably don't even know what it means.
The purpose of a federated instance like Pixelfed is to be a blank state. You can do anything with it. Any niche. Art in this case.
The issue here is to bring these people to Pixelfed and make them feel at home within their niche.
And that's why keep getting abused again and again. So, this is what we must target. Unless we like wasting all of our time just to restart when the next malware arrives because they don't see the difference, see it's anti-libre.
Yes and no, you and me both value software freedom so we both understand that.
Education is obviously part of the process.
But I think most people don't really care if libre or not. Libre or anti-libre is mostly tech jargon for non-tech people.
They just want to be part of their own communities and be where the party is.
Does libre just mean "free?" The way I have been seeing it used in context, I assumed it was a platform of some kind. This thread made me not so sure of that.
Libre means free as in freedom rather than free as in cost. A service that costs money to use, but communicates using open protocols, gives you full control over your data, and allows you to easily migrate to competitors and self-hosted solutions might be described as "libre".
Libre is free and open
Libre is open, but not necessarily no cost.
It's not illegal to charge for a derived product.
Freedom software
Yes, that's the problem to solve.
Which they can't when their software keeps abusing them, anti-libre software. So, we connect the effect to this root cause.
Libre/anti-libre is one of the problem to solve.
Cara seems to be working for them and for now.
For how long? I don't know.
Another problem is related to the instance creation, management and promotion.
From my understanding, only tech people can do that, there aren't many companies providing those services and it's not something average users are interested in.