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

Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:

1. The app I wanted to use didn't even recognize the instance I signed up for and...

2. 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.

Hopefully in a couple of cycles’ time, we’ll be ready for them

Whether it's "capitalist" or not doesn't matter. You could have government owned/created apps that make dumb decisions as well.

At least with capitalism you have the option to go somewhere else when a dumb decision is made.

It's not

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.

Needs sybil attack protection.

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.

This would be a good approach to improve growth of the community.

Does the ActivityPub protocol support copyright for user content? E.g. an artist releases some picture and they explicitly prompt a license. Each client should accept that they are obligated to prompt this license when using the content... Something like this

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.

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.

There's a big inky black spot in my screen where i dropped it and i cant afford a new one and mobile keyboards are ass, so typos in the first idk 50 chars are common. 🪦

Fck Nzis

I really appreciate your super stark pro libre software attitude. I want to support you here. You should know that the approach you are taking is ultra abrasive and would probably cause more harm than help.

People would just associate libre software with militant weirdos, if all they saw where your posts.

If you want to make meaningful change I strongly recommend taking a softer less abrasive approach.

We want libre software to be connected with safety, friendliness and personal autonomy, not militarism, chanted phrases, and dogma.

Even on Lemmy the ultra pro libre software social network (relative to non federated networks) your current approach is off putting. I want you to succeed and I think a different approach may be better.

Just my two cents.

What do you mean by this?:

Cara, bans us from removing malicious source code

Is there obviously malicious source code? Is there a policy that specifically says we can't remove any source code? Is this even open source?

Love your ethos.

You familiar with the Curse of Knowledge?:

Using the two words “source code” with a developer is expected.

With a random artist? Or like 20 or 40 or 75% of artists? Potential dead end.

Keep up the core mindset for sure buddy. Approaches can always be refined and I see you gave it a shot in your edit!

I personally think we have reach a point where we actually can do this. User controlled project can now keep up and sometime beat big business. Look at Asahi Linux, a small group of nerds are reverse-enginering Apple's latest tech, and allowing us to do all kind of things Apple never wanted us to do with these machine. Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud, are all open-source projects keeping up with huge company.

Isn't this just going to be a battle of AIs?

Train the AI on what glaze does and it'll eventually be able to deglaze. So glaze gets better and stops it for a bit and then the deglazer gets better and wins again. Repeat forever.

Ah. No problem. So the notion behind the "big guys are the ones that stand to profit from AI regulation" is that regulation curtails activity in a general sense. However, many of the offices that create regulation defer to industry experts for guidance on regulatory processes, or have former industry experts appointed onto regulatory committees. (good example of the later is Ajit Pai and his removal of net neutrality).

AI regulation at the Federal level has mostly circled "trusted" AI generation, as you mentioned:

But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation

And the talk has been to add checks along the way by the industry itself (much like how the music industry does policing itself or how airline industry has mostly policed itself). So this would leave people like Adobe and Disney to largely dictate what are "trusted" platforms for AI generation. Platforms that they will ensure that via content moderation and software control, that only "trusted" AI makes it out into the wild.

Regulation can then take the shape of social media being required to enforce regulation on AI posts, source distributors like github being required to enforce distribution prohibitions, and so on.

This removes the tools for any AI out of the hands of the public and places them all in the hands of Adobe, Disney, Universal, and so on. And thus, if you wanted to use AI you must use one of their tools, which may in turn have within the TOS that you can not use their product to compete with their product. Basically establishing a monopoly.

This happens a lot in regulatory processes which is why things like the RIAA, the MPAA, Boeing, and so on are so massive and seemingly unbreakable. They aren't enshrined in law, but regulatory processes create a de facto monopoly that becomes difficult to enter because of fear of competition.

The big guys, being the industry leaders, in a regulatory hearing would be the first to get a crack at writing the rules that the regulatory body would debate on. In addition to the expert phase, regulatory process also includes a public comment, this would allow the public to address concerns about the expert submitted recommendation. But as demonstrated back in the public comment of the debate to remove rules regulating ISPs for net neutrality, the FCC decided that the comments were "fake" and only heard a small "selected" percentage of them.

side note: in a regulatory hearing, every public comment accepted must be debated and rationale on the conclusion of the argument submitted to the record. This is why Ajit Pai suspended comments on NN because they didn't want to enter justification that can be brought up in a court case to the record.

The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”

And yeah, that might be worth locking AI out of the hands of the public forever. But it doesn't stop the argument of "AI taking jobs". It just means that small startups will never be able to create jobs with AI. So if the debate is "AI shouldn't take our jobs, let's regulate it", that will only make it worse in the end (sort of how AWS has mostly dominated the Internet services and how everyone started noticing that as not being incredibly ideal around 2019-2021 when Twitter started kicking people off their service and people wanting to build the next Twitter were limited to what Amazon would and would not accept).

So that's the argument. And there's pros and cons to each. But we have to be pretty careful about which way to go, because once we go a direction, it's pretty difficult to change directions because corporations are incredibly good at adapting. I distinctly remember streaming services being the "breath of fresh air from cable" all the way up till it wasn't. And now with hard media becoming harder to purchase (it's not impossible mind you) we've sort of entrenched streaming. Case in point, I love Pokémon Concierge, it is not available for purchase as a DVD or whatever (at least not a non-bootleg version), so if I ever want to watch it again I need Netflix.

And do note, I'm not saying we shouldn't have regulation on AI, what I am saying is that there's a lot for consideration with AI regulation. And the public needs to have some unified ideas about it for the regulatory body's public comment section to ensure small businesses that want to use AI can still be allowed. Otherwise the expert phase will dominate and AI will be gone from the public's hands for quite some time. We're just now getting around to reversing the removal of net neutrality that started back in 2017. But companies have used that 2017 to today to form business alliances (Disney + Hulu Verizon deal as an example) that'll be hard to compete with for some time.

Nothing but by now we got used to switching service whenever it gets bad

I mean avoiding AI images is baked into their mission statement. I guess they could go full asshole and renig on this, but unlike Meta who can piss off a lot of people without affecting their bottom line. If Cara renigs on their whole point of being, a huge chunk of their user base is going to run off. It would likely be suicidal and only good for a quick cash grab exit strategy. I mean, I fully believe almost anything tech should sadly be expected to crumble to enshitification on increasingly shorter arcs. If you are looking for long term quality online services that don't decay, you are in for lots of dissapointment.

If adults can't make pillowforts they're basically dead inside

Ah. Thanks.

I have an easy solution for that: I think I'll just delete my account. I'm not using it anyways.

I mean, but that’s the point? For creators? Not as a replacement for Facebook. I don’t want to share my stuff with people who are just gonna steal it and share it as their own in some Facebook group or on Reddit. Literally sharing with creators is the purpose of these apps.