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
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.
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.
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.
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.
