Cara: by artists, for artists Reviews

Definitely needs some work as it’ll need to handle the constant influx of users but overall its working amazingly and i've already connected with quite a few artists! Time will tell if i’m able to build a following and/or fully migrate here, but I certainly look forward to everything Cara will become for artists <3

So I just started using this and I adore it. My only beef is that twice now I’ve tried to add art to my portfolio and it’s “flagged it as AI”.
Ai is literally the bane of my existence. Never once have I generated any kind of art with Ai but especially not these. All my art is hand made. It says to let them know if this is wrong but I don’t know how and it’s a little frustrating. I work hard on everything I make and to be told it’s AI generated is kind of infuriating to say the least. I’ve literally put glaze on all my art idk what to do to make it right. I’d really appreciate some help

I think this’ll be my new favorite social-media app to chill. Though my only suggestion is adding DM’s & allow us to share clips of videos through posts. Cause Cara has lots of potential to be something worth a great while 🎊

I downloaded Cara because it looked really cool! However, the second I opened it it said it needed a mandatory update. I pressed confirm and tried to set up an account, but for some reason it kept asking me if I would like to paste from Instagram? Even after I closed instagram, I got the pop up every other second. It’s unusable and I gave up trying to set up an account. If this gets fixed I would love to download it again! It looks great!

This seems like an awesome app just waiting for more people to poor in as it’s a new app (also its a bit slow but I’m not complaining as I understand its new)

I can’t wait for this app’s growth and its official version!!

Highly recommend every artist to get Cara

AI is stealing our art, Instagram and meta ai are planning to feed all of our things into their generators. We need a platform like this to move to

i absolutely am in love with Cara. the artists are all incredibly talented. it’s very easy to find people and get exposure on Cara. the only issues i have are that Cara feels a bit slow. this is obviously going to occur because Cara is very new, but overall i love the concept of Cara and plan on posting all of my art here!

I was trying to read the TOS and rules just so I could make sure to follow them and understand them, but it became hard to read since I’m dyslexic

I love Cara completely dont get me wrong! Amazing place!!!

But it’s insanely hard to read due to my dyslexia 💔

I made a few posts but for some reason every time I try to post another picture, it crashes.
😭
I want to keep using it but it’s so unstable

Please add more flexibility for what you can make your username!! My default one was taken so I wanted to make it the same as my Instagram and TikTok but you aren’t allowed to use periods in the usernames. Consistently across platforms will help a lot of artists moving over!! This is a small but really important fix imo

i love Cara. is it completely perfect? no. & is there more that can be done? yes! but considering the developers been paying out of pocket to create this and it isn’t made by some big corporation with a fat budget, i’m impressed that they’re doing what they can as well as so grateful for going out their way to deposit their working money into what started out small (& still relatively is) but is growing & becoming more of a safe space for artist. for what it is so far, it beats instagram for me to share my art. personally, it’s more peaceful, there’s no A.I or meta, and i get to look at other people’s art.. ALL types of art & that’s all i see. art made by people! i love the mixture of former twitter & instagram as well. i love that it’s safe for work & appropriate for artists’ of all ages as well. every-time i look through comments it’s very supportive of one another & it’s a breath of fresh air. art is to be seen by everyone including an audience of who isn’t artists, i get that, but it’s just nice to still be around former ones. that being said, i appreciate the joy Cara brought to me. thanks this app team! work hard & i will support you in this project (ik it won’t be cheap especially with the way people’s been coming through loool). excited for future features; what you have so far is great.

I actually really like the UI of this app its easy to navigate imo. The “portfolio” and timeline sections in the profile were a little confusing at first but just think of the portfolio section as the Instagram gallery on your profile and the Timeline as Twitter scrolling. Other art focused apps usually end up going downhill because the creators turn out to be weirdos and Cara itself looks clunky and unprofessional but this app looks professional and sleek i was surprised at first when I found out they have a small team that are all just volunteering!! The only things I dont like about it at the moment is how slow it is which is understandable because they have a small dev team and theres a huge wave of newcomers signing up like me so hopefully it can get fixed soon. I also hope they will allow us to upload videos so that people can post things like animations with audio. Im hopeful for the future of this app and having a safeplace to post images that isn’t trying to get into the whole AI stuff.

Cara is a breath of fresh air. I’ve never had such good interactions with real people on social media. I’m a tiny artist, I’m not bringing a big following with me, so these interactions are genuine and organic. I haven’t had a single post ignored or squashed out of existence by the almighty algorithm, even if it’s just receiving a like or two. There are obviously going to be bugs and issues this early, especially with the massive growth they’ve been experiencing. The team is incredibly responsive to bugs and feedback, so while things might be slow or a post can’t make it through or something wrongfully gets flagged as AI, I can be patient because the rest is so good. And I’d rather have something flagged incorrectly as AI then having lots of AI make it through the filter. There is a lot of room for growth here though, like being more welcoming to other kinds of artists (categories for more visual arts like ceramics, fiber arts, and other 3D traditional arts, as well as other kinds of arts like music and writing), but I’ve seen those suggestions thrown around a lot and I believe they will come with time.

Magnifying pieces doesn’t feel very responsive, it takes a lot of effort to zoom in all the way and panning across an image.
User-interface stroke size for the like, repost, comment etc.
Tagging media seems under encouraged which means that it’s difficult to find art in certain categories.
I do hope some of the more major issues get resolved but most of the ones I list here are moreso low-priority.
The largest problem I’ve encountered is through the discover tab though. On an art piece, clicking a thumbnail may only show the text in the post and I have to exit and leave the post 1-2 times for the actual art to show up. This could be a fault of either something internal or the site not having a proper buffering screen since I know my WiFi is rather unreliable at times.

I’ve been using this app on desktop since it launched, and it’s everything I could ask for in a Deviantart/Artstation alternative. Professional, geared for those in entertainment/commercial industries, or who are trying to break in, well designed UI/UX, easy to keep track of the ones you follow, job listings, and a social aspect with text posts, just to name a few features. Very happy to see it as an app now, it works great, and excited to see what’s to come.

What drew me in initially was the respect the creators have towards artists who are against unethical AI art, and how they recognize that it threatens our jobs/livelihoods in its current, unregulated state that violates privacy and copyright. Their dedication to uphold this through AI image detection and moderation is really admirable. Thank you for the hard work on this, and hoping to continue to see this app grow!

I’ve currently no complaints. It’s new and growing swiftly so I understand that has some growing pains that comes when you grow faster than you can keep up between hardware and software updates so the occasional bug isn’t a deal breaker.

A platform for everyone, which respects artists, is really fantastic and I LOVE seeing so much art on my page. While as a realistic I recognize it’s possible for sustainability there could be ads in the future - ground level freedom of that is magical. It’s even easier to find more artists to follow and the way you can set up how you view content is really genius. You can put your percentage of content you follow vs new content shown to you.

I’ve got no complaints. It’s wonderful and I highly recommend it for everyone, especially artists and art enthusiasts 💕

its my 2nd day of using this application and its going quite well! i was able to interact with new artists, however there are some flaws that are needed to be fixed:

- category between the home page & following page; the people that i follow seem to appear in the home section, making it quite useless with the “following” sector. it pretty much blocks out the potential to find other artists. (exclude the discovery oge)

- slow & laggy - it would take a lot of time to load when; posting, liking, commenting etc. however, by assumption there are probably a lot of people downloading the application at the same time.

- repetitiveness - ive been seeing the same posts back to back in my feed. for ex: i will like a post, but then it’ll reappear over and over again.

overall i hope you all will take the time to read my review and fix the issue as soon as you can. i wish your team with the best of luck as i see a LOT of potential for Cara to grow!! ☆

Like many artists, I’m very frustrated with Insta. Not only the whole AI thing but being constantly bombarded with msgs offering to boost followers, reels cluttering my feed, messages from the NFT crazies. Cara is a ray of light that hopefully will give us a space to post and share art with other artists and keep all the riff raff out. It’s in Beta but seems to be great so far once I figured out how to use it. I know there’s a small team working Cara but I really hope they keep it for artists only. I’ve already managed to come across some people’s pages who have comments left that we all dread “great artworks, are they for sale?” Etc. I clicked on the person who commented and no surprise , they are a digital marketer. Ya say you’re an NFTer without saying you’re an NFTer. Please keep these people OUT!

If we don’t want our art to be stolen and don’t want to be exploited by major companies, we need to support the small ones trying to actually make a stand for us. I give this 5 stars knowing it’s not where it needs to be but I’m willing to wait for them to figure everything out cause the alternative is having my art fed through AI in this dystopian hellscape. Seeing some of these reviews, people are really being unreasonable when Cara is run by a team of volunteers that wasn’t expecting to get almost a million new users in less than a week. If we don’t want to be robbed and exploited by big companies…We need to be patient and support the people who are trying to help.

Im going to be looking forward to seeing the progress Cara makes with it's platform. there are a lot of great ideas and with instagram moving forward with using people's posts for training AI, Im seeing a mass migration of artists over here and Im very glad to see it.
that being said, this platform clearly wasn't ready to grow as big as it has as quick as it has. it's very slow and has a lot of network errors that prevent me from posting anything at all on it. there are also a lot of small UI annoyances that make it hard to want to use, like Im fighting Cara just to use it.
I know it's still in beta though and Im really hoping everything gets really streamlined and starts to work well. I could see this potentially becoming the best platform for artist if they play their cards right.

Most of the negative reviews say it’s slow and laggy, but that’s only because they didn’t expect to see so much traffic, and the team has been working tirelessly to fix it. I have not had any issues with that in the last few days.

Cara itself is amazing and I think it has so much potential for artists. It balances professional and causal use extremely well, allowing users to both boast a portfolio and make Twitter-like posts to their timeline. It’s easy to discover other artists and interact, and so far the community has been extremely supportive and active. I hope it continues this way and can succeed DeviantArt.

A bit unstable, but I assume that situation will improve. The real red flag is that this app forces its algorithmic timeline on you, with no way of setting just the people you're following as a default. That is a *really* bad sign. Even Twitter never did that. (It's not possible in the timeline settings to set the "people you follow" to 100% and the junk to 0%.) I was drawn to this app because they gave the impression that they respected artists and users. Denying me control of my timeline in the name of "user engagement" is a pretty glaring indication of how much the people who run this app respect their users. Even if they've adopted an ethical stance on AI right now, I'm pretty tired of being burned by social networks that just get more and more awful. The fact I'm already seeing flickers of the usual tech-company user-hostility on a service that's barely just launched gives me real pause about getting too invested in this app.

I believe in Jingna’s vision. It’s an absolutely cool social media platform that can benefit artists around the world. People needed to remember that Cara is still in Beta mode so there is glitches, bugs, and issues need to be fix. They start out as a small team and if given more time, it will be no problem in the future. I mostly used this app on browser or my computer which works nicely and fast. To be able to interact with people where I am free from AI images, it’s a heaven where I can finally see the artworks from my favorite artists. Please continue to do the good work, so very grateful we have something alternative as to Instagram or Artstation.

I just made my account last week and have been on there everyday since. The interface feels like a mash of Twitter, and old Instagram. I dislike other social media cause it feels like everything is catered to businesses and already big creators. On this app I feel like I’m actually connected to other artists and real people, which I haven’t felt in years on other social media. I made an account just to support other artists and didn’t think much of my own art, but I’ve gotten more traction in a week on this app than 3 years on my art account on IG. I honestly love the idea of this app, and wish the best for this platform.

I really love having a more dedicated art social free from AI, but three things: let me follow tags PLEASE, let me organize my likes into folders or something, and please make a dedicated UI format thing for iPad screens. A lot of artists use iPads and tablets and stuff and it would be nice to be able to go on this app and have it actually fit the size of the screen I’m on. (Also in general loading times on this are pretty slow so it’d be nice to fix that). Otherwise I think Cara has a lot of potential and I’m excited to see how it evolves

Some bugs to fix, when you’re making a board and you name it there’s a plethora of problems, first, why does the title have to be unique? Am I getting points for creativity? It’s really annoying because no matter what you put as the title it never works, eventually I gave up and started raging. Second, the board actually does save (but it doesn’t tell you that) so now I have 20 boards of just different cuss words. Third, more of just a suggestion but you should make it easier to follow someone. Forth, I pressed ‘sign in’ instead of ‘sign up’ on accident and there’s no way to go back unless you exit out entirely. Other than that it’s pretty great.

I really want Cara to be good. Maybe it’s the flood of IG artists hopping on and overwhelming the platform, but it just doesn’t function for me. Anything I try to do gives me a spinning wheel for a while. There’s no way to find my existing connections. Things don’t update in a timely way (ie: still not seeing the people I’ve followed or images I upload show on my profile minutes later). Buttons are misspelled for goodness sake. I had to google how to add images to my portfolio. The design just isn’t very intuitive.

I love the concept and I know this is a small team just starting out and doing their best. But there’s a mass movement of artists coming from other platforms and I hope they can pull it together! Artists need a win right now.

I still can’t get upload any of my arts. I have tried over and over but it’s still do nothing. Also it can’t even show avatar picture and I couldn’t change anything in settings. And I don’t want to complain about these because Cara is still Beta version but I wish you guys could fix and can’t wait to use Cara in its full version. Since this will be safe space for artist so I’m glad that you guys did Cara. Thanks for reading this and hope you guys have a nice day Xx

Cara itself and how it functions is great, the community is awesome. It would be my new favorite posting site but the loading time takes forever. I'll sit there waiting for a search result or someone's profile to load for like 5 minutes and then end up with a 'loading error' after everything.

I am assuming this is because a lot of people are moving to this app and the servers hosting it aren't able to keep up (similarly to how Art Fight crashes on the first day of launch). I trust this issue will be resolved eventually, but until then I cannot give a higher review.

I waited a bit before writing anything but honestly, I am loving this app. Keep in mind, Cara is in BETA, so it is not perfect but each step along the way the team has been transparent and each update is an improvement. As of writing this review you may notice a few things such as slow load times when uploading a post or the occasional error but nothing crazy, especially for something in beta still.
Cara is a mix of Instagram/Twitter in the way it functions and your profile will have a portfolio/timeline and about me section. The categories when making a portfolio addition are a bit lacking as of right now but each update seems to bring more options.
When you get a notification about a comment and click on it, unfortunately it only takes you to the post and not the comment so it is a bit difficult to respond to comments as of right now but I am confident a future update will resolve this as well.
Overall, this app is a breath of fresh air thus far and if you are looking for somewhere to display your art, I highly recommend giving it a try and being patient. I have not only experienced more engagement but seeing nothing but art has been so much better for my mental health. I feel inspired again and it is just so dang nice. I am excited to see where this app goes as it develops.

I know a lot of ppl will be negative and compare this with platforms like artfol, but I do genuinely believe that Cara is different for many reasons; their stance on AI along with the recent news in Meta and letdown for authentic artists on literal art focused platforms (Deviantart, artstation, tumblr), this app really feels like the last standing alternative that actually cares about creatives.

Yeah Cara has some issues, but it’s inevitable when thousands of artists are moving there fast. I also want to suggest a longer ‘Lastest’ tab bc I would love to see more amazing works. Would also love a more expanded search bar so we can look at categories. Hoping that their Glaze page gets back up soon, as well. Keep it up!

I’m giving Cara 5 stars because of it’s potential and it’s motives. I LOVE that it is anti ai and that it’s trying to be a platform that supports real artists and creators. People that create things deserve respect.
I love that Cara recommends art that has just been posted though I wish it showed more then a few in my feed.
Cara does have some issues it is very clearly in beta slow and often needs to be reloaded. It’s a bit buggy and definitely needs work but it it’s worth supporting. I truly hope they will work out the bugs and kinks Cara has and make it a great place for artist.
Currently Cara doesn’t allow nsfw art but by the sounds of it that is just an issue that will be around while it’s in beta and will eventually be worked out.

Okay so Cara is in its beta stage for obvious reasons, but I can see that this app has a lot of potential to become a top contender as artists’ main platform. It has become increasingly difficult to reach out to larger audiences on insta, and to not get bombarded with spam accounts. I used to love Twitter back then bc I could easily follow and discover new artists on my timeline, but those days are pretty much gone too. this app gives me nostalgia for both, and while it’s still in its early phases, being a bit slow, clunky, and not properly filtering different artworks into correct categories, it has so much potential to become an iconic app for artists! I’m excited for new features to get added over time - great work so far to the developers!

(Thank you for the NSFW filter. Im sick of “sex sells” being used and repeated to get more attention than other artists. That includes the female nippl which someone was complaining about, but even if artists are showing them “tastefully” they will still be looked at lustfully by idiots, therefore it is still NSFW. After all NSFW means “not safe for work” and if your boss walks around the corner and there are female nipples on your screen… it wouldnt be good.)

That being said, i came to write a review saying that my bio keeps duplicating? I keep going in and deleting the second line of it bc its duplicated and it just comes back next time i open Cara …

I don’t have much to add to the positive reviews, because this does seem to have a lot of potential as a replacement for Instagram- however my one real complaint is (unless it is user error on my end) is that rectangular works cannot be displayed properly. I get that the thumbnails have to be a square of course, but as a painter and filmmaker who mostly is working in more of a landscape aspect ratio, it stinks that I can’t post a good amount of my work because most of the important parts of the compositions will be cropped out. If that weren’t an issue, this would easily be a 5 star review.