Davis: cara.app is experiencing scaling issues and unanticipated costs. As an huge fan of Bluesky, I've submitted a suggestion in their Discord's #suggestions channel to consider exploring atproto as an option, which could unite bsky and cara. Please consider leaving your thoughts in the thread! 🙂

cara.app is experiencing scaling issues and unanticipated costs. As an huge fan of Bluesky, I've submitted a suggestion in their Discord's #suggestions channel to consider exploring atproto as an option, which could unite bsky and cara. Please consider leaving your thoughts in the thread! 🙂

A link to the Discord channel 🙂 : discord.com/channels/105...

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Gamesdiscord.com Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.

If you like the cara + bsky idea, please go give my suggestion in Discord an upvote so they consider it! My only hope is for them to give it a serious consideration, and decide if it's a worthwhile idea for them 🙂 It's in the #suggestions channel of their discord: discord.com/invite/cara-...

Join the Cara Beta Discord Server!discord.com Cara is an artist portfolio & social platform. Share your feedback on our app beta & hear the latest dev updates! ✨ | 10382 members

For some reason I can not get that link to work D:

shucks, maybe this link, then find the suggestions channel?: discord.com/invite/cara-...

Join the Cara Beta Discord Server!discord.com Cara is an artist portfolio & social platform. Share your feedback on our app beta & hear the latest dev updates! ✨ | 10382 members

That one worked! I have joined, even though my brain is going "warning, spoons low. please refill!"

If I were the founder I would legitimately be freaking the F out. Going from $150 to $100k/mo in a week? Insane. I donated, but don't think that channel alone will suffice.

yeah, those costs are going to keep happening every month, so they'll need to keep getting money / monetize and/or improve cost-savings, somehow.

[tech vulture voice]: i may know a way

Oof, that is one heck of a notification to get

I just hope the owners don't sell out to a big tech company, even if the possibility of that is slim. Instagram started out as an indie company until it was bought by Meta in 2014. I think about where Insta would be if the original owners didn't sell out and kept it truly independent.

Independence has a price. One not everyone is willing to pay until it's too late. I've seen this movie many times before.

Yeah, the bills will not get smaller, and the cost of people who might have expertise in that area ( @quinnypig.bsky.social etc.) are not cheap either. I hope the team gets enough support somehow.

I really don't know how the heck are they going to solve the situation without selling out to some evil VC or corp entity with strings attached. If they somehow manage to, that should be world news — a first indeed, as far as I know.

MY TWO FAVES?? COMING TOGETHER??????

It's a long shot, but I couldn't just not suggest it! 🙂

This is interesting because iirc eugen has reached out similarly to talk about AP integration

I wonder what percentage of their operational costs come from the glaze-ing. IMHO it's a waste of GPU time, but it sounds like its a feature that users want regardless

I've wondered about the effectiveness of Glaze, but not taken time to run any testing of my own. If it's not effective, then I'd agree, we'd only be consuming more resources to still reach the same result. I'm not familiar with eugen, who/what is it? 🙂

I haven't really played around with it, but supposedly the "glaze" effect can easily be filtered out: github.com/gogodr/Adver... I've also heard anecdotally that people have struggled to replicate their academic results. Eugen Rochko is the founder of Mastodon.

ah, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to filter out glaze. This makes me think I should really look into how effective glaze is and how well filtering tools like that work.

fwiw even the underlying mechanism doesn’t seem viable at all - one of the first steps when training a model is a ‘standard’ denoise and then resample to a lower res - ‘glazing’ does not survive that. Removing it is also trivial - github.com/yoinked-h/de... - those are not complex functions.

deglazer/methods at main · yoinked-h/deglazergithub.com deglaze images. Contribute to yoinked-h/deglazer development by creating an account on GitHub.

They have a post on their site dated May 29 that actually indicates glaze has been disabled due to security measures, which I’d be curious to hear more about. They also mention the site experienced malicious traffic, which makes me wonder if they used glaze to DoS the site?

Ooop, linking the post would be helpful 🤦🏻 blog.cara.app/blog/may-29-...

Site Status & Known Issues — Cara - Artist Social & Portfolio Platformblog.cara.app Current known issues & troubleshooting info

This screenshot also has me curious. I’m way into speculation here, but it makes me wonder if the malicious traffic was the attacker finding a way to kick off multiple glaze jobs per request. Either way, it’s possible mitigating security issues will help them bring costs back down.

I’m interested about Eugen’s talk but to me Cara is a textbook example of a service that could be built over ATproto. The timing was just bad (Cara started development more than a year ago I think). ActivityPub wouldn’t solve any of the scaling, cost or moderation issues.

Idk what I could add to the convo since I don’t know any technical thingies… but I suppose I can give it a thumbs up or something??? Does that help?

that absolutely helps! my only hope is that they take a serious look at the suggestion and decide whether it's a good fit for them. if not, no big deal, but I'd hate for it to never be suggested and potentially would have been useful to them.

ATProto sounds great! Im hoping they can raise enough money to stay afloat. I'm just glad that i get to connect with other artists and have my work seen at all there.

I hope they can stay afloat too. They definitely need to find a solution though, because the costs are exceeding what they can afford. 😰

Yeah, if it had to come to this adding the ads and the subscription options, so be it. They earned every penny for all the hard work they did 💯

Yeah, I’d gladly pay for services like Bluesky and Cara. I’d very much like to avoid the ads though 😅

I don't blame you. I rather a subscription option over ads any day 💯👍🏾

BlueSky and Cara together? Sounds great to me! I love them both and if I remember it right, both are against AI and fits together. Would be great if they can help each other together. I love both sites ❤️

Same! I'd love to see it. I don't know if the suggestion would be worthwhile to them or if the effort would be too much, but I had to at least suggest it :)

I just saw Jingna's post on Cara this morning about it and oh my gods that is a big bill D: I think it would be cool if Cara and Bluesky could team up somehow! There's already a ton of artist on here who also dig Cara!

I already have the most followers on Meta-based platforms and I don't want to create too many more social media/art accounts to this suggestion is very appealing and might actually encourage me to use Bluesky more.

It’s one of the best selling points of bluesky imo. Their API is intended to be built up for more applications and allow people to take their same followers and following wherever they go that uses the protocol. 🙂

Just heard about Cara today. The thought of it an Bluesky helping prop each other up has a nice sound to it. I hope it works out.

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