Why a Half a Million Artists left Instagram for Cara Last Week

So wait. An app we can post our art on that doesn't feed it to AI learning machines? An app that doesn't try and monetize us and bleed us dry to share our work with each other? Reminds me of the days you took your notebook to school and showed your drawings to your friends. Ahh the good ole days.

Jumped to Cara immediately after i learn about it. I wish 2 things. That it will be an IG killer for artists. I want to leave instagram permanently with my whole being for years. I haven't done it because it's the most easy way to find my favourite artists. 2 I wish cara keeps it SIMPLE just posts. No "reels" no stories no nothing just posts. A place were you scroll for some inspiration and joy and then go draw. Let's support Cara so we can have our own internet art corner the way we want it .

I soo want Cara to succeed and become popular. At least among artists. Imagine having a platform without reels, shorts, influencers. Only artworks from other artists, and no AI. That's a dream, lets help it come true.

Wait. She's that artist who went viral on twitter because an artist referenced her work for a competition without her permission. Bless her and everyone who created this platform. As someone who loves art it's amazing to see this.

I’m using Cara for my portfolio. I discovered yesterday you can actually reorder your portfolio posts. This is huge for anyone who likes to group their work by themes or colors. Cara was designed by an artist for artists & it shows.

Let's be honest, Instagram is currently in the pits lately due to collaborating with AI (which is a total outrage) and trying to be more like TikTok with reels.

Having Glaze integrated into the platform as a whole is excellent. As far why people are getting "really, really mad about artists trying to protect their work", you spelled out exactly why they're angy. Stopping AI bros from scraping art, and if anything poisoning their models, means they both don't have stolen art to train their rubbish AI and their attempts to steal art lead to their models getting damaged. Will need to look into this platform... I like the way they're going about things.

As an artist, I gave up on Instagram years ago. Over the last few years, my engagement went from getting thousands of likes, comments, and followers on my posts to being lucky if I hit 30 views. Nobody sees my work anymore and I've only lost thousands of followers since 2020. I've switched most of my focus to YouTube (in hopes of getting my channel monetized soon too), and that's been great, but I've been wishing for another app that is kinder to artists. I have lots of hope for Cara and I've also been posting my work there. Let's see what happens! ❤️

Yeah, I joined Cara a few days ago, it's great obviously, the art community never fails to come together. I still don't plan to delete my Instagram account though, because I know people outside the art community as well. But it's sad and dirty at the same time for Instagram to tell us they really don't need us, yet are willing to steal our work....

Never heard of Cara before. Thanks for this. I'm sick of Instagram recommending mainly 304 influencers on my feed.

The problem is artists want non artists to see their work. Only artists have moved to Cara. I want consumers, potential clients to see my work, not fellow artists.

One important thing to keep in mind is that those platforms are usually almost exclusively used by other artists. So as long as you just want to post your portfolio then its great but as soon as you try to reach a broader audience and possibly sell commissions and other products to earn money then its sadly still bound to the conventional social media platforms. So migrate your stuff to use cara in addition but don't go and delete your account or your posts and "switch". That will just ruin all you have built, kill off the engagement of your fanbase and essentially ruin any way to earn money in the short term. If cara turns out to be the new big thing then thats amazing but dont risk your hard work in building your network for a "insert random social media platform - killer" like we have seen on a lot of other occasions.

What worries me about cara is that servers are very, very expensive, and it'll need to be monetized sooner or later; not sure if pure donations and at-will subscriptions will suffice

Im sick of everything on instagram being a video. I think I will check it out!

Cara sounds promising. I don’t draw but I do photography as a hobby. Thanks

I wish we could have "traditional TV shows and Hollywood movies" get put into AI without their consent. I bet laws would change faster

The problem is, Cara at some point WILL have to monetize something about the platform and/or most likely its users. They have no choice if they want to survive because servers cost a fortune to rent or operate. So either selling user data, bringing in advertisers to the platform (which usually comes with content moderation or restriction demands from said advertisers) or charging users directly via subscriptions.

All I do with these new platforms is claim my username before anybody else does and never use it.

One thing that you left out (or maybe you're finding out as you read), is that not only the opt out form is very difficult to access to (for what it should be), but apparently it actually lets you go through with it, but if you don't have a Facebook account associated with your Instagram account you want to opt out from it does... nothing? Literally, you don't even get the email rejection. You just wait and nothing happens. I submitted twice (because I have a personal Instagram account, linked to Facebok, and an art account, not linked), and yeah, still waiting. Oh well. I'm creatinglightly on Cara, as well as everywhere else 😅 It's good that you did this video Brad (even though there's people asking what Cara is before even watching the video lol)

It's kinda wild to me that people here are saying that you can't do "business" on an artist-first platform... prior to the rise of self-absorbed hellholes like twitter and instagram, vast majority of artists did all their business on Deviantart which was - that's right - an artist-first site. It grew because eventually the criticial mass of pretty pictures was enough for non-artists to start signing up in droves (it also supported a wide array of arts so a lot of people, even if they didn't think they were capital-A Artists, could upload stuff like short stories or comics made from their action figure collections to spruce up their profile). If enough artists withdraw their talent to Cara, the business will follow.