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
techcrunch.com
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
You are viewing a single comment
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.