People talking about pixelfed are missing a key point: Cara is super easy to find and join. You go, type your email or login with your google account and that's it. You don't even have to remember a password. Nobody wants to find a server, apply to join, hope to get accepted, then somehow find all other artists like you.
Also, it looks good. Like, really good. That's a thing that grab the attention of artists.
This right here. I tried to join Mastodon today.
Download the most recommended app, Moshidon
Open app and get asked which instance i want to join. There are no suggestions.
Do a search for instances and pick one, go to the website and register with email and password. Requires email confirmation. Still waiting on the email confirmation link, 4 hrs later and 2 resends.
Literally haven't been able to sign up yet.
Even if it had worked, the workflow would have been to change back to the app, type out the instance then re-login.
I'm not sure how anyone expects anyone other than the most hardcore to sign up for these services. Maybe that's the point but if the point is to grow the user sign up process to significant overall
Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:
The app I wanted to use didn't even recognize the instance I signed up for and...
I had to wait nearly a month and a half before being able to actuallyuse my account and access Mastodon because I joined an instance where they review people signing up or something similar.
I definitely see the appeal of a find the site, sign up, and you're done services over the fediverse join an instance and pray service.
If you just used the Official app, they have a simplified sign-up procedure. Dug your own grave there.
Thats not fair, since everyone says the main app suck and you'll have a better experience with Moshidon. This is true if you're already there, but the comment makes it clear that it still lacks for newbies.
They're just gonna have to leave whenever Cara makes some dumb decision. It's the capitalist app cycle.
Hopefully in a couple of cycles’ time, we’ll be ready for them
Pixelfed isn’t even in the App Store and isn’t geared towards artists. Cara has specific features for artists including finding jobs
It's still a centralized system
That's the thing, nobody cares. Its even better to be centralised because there's someone you can sue for damages if that's the case.
And then that growth promptly blew its budget because it's using expensive cloud AI services from Vercel and it has no means of monetization whatsoever to bring money in.
People can do whatever they want, of course. But they have to pay for the resources they consume while doing that, and it seems Cara didn't really consider that aspect of this.
Well, now's a great time to let them know about Pixelfed, although explosive growth like this will be a strain on any website.
I get the sense that a federated image hosting/sharing system would be counter to their goals, that being to lock away their art from AI trainers. An AI trainer could just federate with them and they'd be sending their images over on a silver platter.
Of course, any site that's visible to humans is also visible to AIs in training, so it's not really any worse than their current arrangement. But I don't think they want to hear that either.
Really hoping to see a surge in demand for "Anti-AI" software/services/community.
Fuck the Hype and the bubble cant pop fast enough
I'm all for replacing the s at the beginning of words with z so you read it in an exaggerated German accent, but you gotta be consistent
Really hoping to zee a zurge in ze demand for "Anti-AI" zoftware/zervices/community
Fixed that for you there, Goebbels
From Cara:
We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation
Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot's of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let's just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.
I'm just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they'll be the one's tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.
In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily
And the thing is, is Photoshop even "human-made art"? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.
So I don't disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara's existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.
I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there's a lot of propensity to blame AI when it's the CEO's writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.
I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it's easy to diss on AI right now, because it's so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.
Like I get that people building models from other people's stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that's all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it's going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.
There's not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they're going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be "trusted".
I hate that Pixelfed isn't good enough to capture these users and I say this as someone who uses it over Instagram.
From the what I've seen (and I have been watching fairly closely), I think Pixelfed and the stretched-too-thin-can't-prioritize-and-somewhat-monarchial dev himself might just need more time to cook. I still have hope in him and his projects but I won't be holding my breath again. If good shit happens, it happens. And I do hope it happens because it should've been Pixelfed in this article like Mastodon was with Twitter or Lemmy with Reddit. Not whatever this new corp that came out of nowhere is.
I think we should not expect a volunteer (or small group of volunteers) to keep up with a billion dollar company
I just signed up and I know it's still centralized but I love being able to just look at art. Besides anything that is anti -AI I am in for
Well, it's certainly better than Instagram... Who knows, maybe Cara could federate with ActivityPub in the future... Not that I'll keep my hopes up for that.
Meta is just going to scrub all the Cara content into their AI system anyway. They have no fear because there are no real consequences
If they do, it’s going to be a bad time for them, since Cara has Glaze integration and encourages everyone to use it. https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
step one of enshittification has begun. again.
Neat. I like the concept. From a viewing perspective do wish it had some filters and better browsing capacity for finding art, but definitely bookmarkable - glad it's growing.
how does cara compare to pillowfort?
well for starters it sounds less stupid
If adults can't make pillowforts they're basically dead inside
i didn't say that. i meant it's a stupid name for this.
just like duckduckgo; i like ddg but that's a terrible name for a search engine.
It has potential, with good marketing strategy I believe more users will know this.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
