What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?

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

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.

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If they keep burning $100k/w on their Vercel bill they might not be around that long anyway!

I tried but there is no app for it.

Fdroid has pixeldroid which is apparently incompatible with my android 12 phone?

The pixelfed app isn't downloadable on Fdroid and is only available for "pre-download" on the play store.

I couldn't find out how to access pixelfed through a mastodon app.

If it isn't easily accessible through mobile, it simply won't be picked up.

The main problem with all the alternatives is for me (as a hobby photographer) the lack of models on these platforms. When looking for models, I find them on Instagram and no other platform. As with WhatsApp the majority of "normal" people have decided to use that, so if I'm telling them to contact me on Signal, they shy away from that (and stillI I refuse to use it as much as possible).

So looking at Signal, it's free and very, very close to WhatsApp and yet still people don't want to use that. Getting them to use pixel fed would be much, much harder.

Solves the problem for a few years until Meta buys their users and data back.

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.

Yep, this is just instagram again with a little anti ai image filter on top. And a portfolio, not a photo album !

If it's not as interoperable as email, it belongs in the trash

Ok, the lady behind Cara just WON a f-ing copywrite lawsuit against some dick that stole her artwork. I'm 100% sure the wording is so if you *think* about stealing from Cara, she will come after your ass with both guns blazing.

That’s not true

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They actually seem quite a bit different. The one for Cara isn't perfectly round and seems to suggest a person in the middle.

The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed w it

I really want Pixelfed to take off and this really could have been a moment, but after using it for more than a year now, I just can't see it. Development is very slow - it feels like a one-man show (it might not be). We do need an alternative to Instagram, but yeah..

Funny you should mention that.

Pixelfed is the alternative we want

So much bad faith, I logged in just fine with a regular e-mail.

you can use your email

You have a problem with oauth?

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.

Thanks for the link. This is pretty much what I expected.

They have huge bills to pay already. It can totally lead to enshittification.

Sounds like another pan

You'll have to ask the company that eventually buys them out!

What's a "plan"?

Its Instagram mashed up with artstation

There was anti-AI art campaign a few months back by Artstation user due to Artstation allowing them.

It's not. It's supposed to target certain open source AIs (Stable Diffusion specifically).

Latent diffusion models work on compressed images. That takes less resources. The compression is handled by a type of AI called VAE. For this attack to work, you must have access to the specific VAE that you are targeting.

The image is subtly altered so that the compressed image looks completely different from the original. You can only do that if you know what the compression AI does. Stable Diffusion is a necessary part of the Glaze software. It is ineffective against any closed source image generators that have trained their own VAE (or equivalent).

This kind of attack is notoriously fickle and thwarted by even small changes. It's probably not even very effective against the intended target.

If you're all about intellectual property, it kinda makes sense that freely shared AI is your main enemy.

It pollutes the data pool. The rule of gigo (garbage in garbage out) is used to garbage the AI results.

Basically, it puts some imperceptible stuff in the image file's data (somebody else should explain how because I don't know) so that what the AI sees and the human looking at the picture sees are rather different. So you try and train it to draw a photorealistic car and instead it creates a lumpy weird face or something. Then the AI uses that defective nonsense to learn what "photorealistic car" means and reproduce it - badly.

If you feed a bunch of this trash into an AI and tell it that this is how to paint like, say, Rembrandt, and then somebody uses it to try to paint a picture like Rembrandt, they'll end up getting something that looks like it was scrawled by a 10-year-old, or the dogs playing poker went through a teleporter malfunction, or whatever nonsense data was fed into the AI instead.

If you tell an AI that 2+2=🥔, that pi=9, or that the speed of light is Kevin, then nobody can use that AI to do math.

If you trained Chat GPT to explain history by feeding it descriptions of games of Civ6 them nobody could use it to cheat on their history term paper. The AI would go on about how Gandhi attacked Mansa Musa in 1686 with all out nuclear war. It's the same thing here, but with pictures.