Imagine a world... Where the content your see... Is chosen... By you...
Dramatic music montage
Jump to heading Why is this novel?
Seriously, I hate that this is actually something I'm so excited for! If you haven't seen, there is a new social media app called Cara. It is what you would expect for a volunteer based, artist oriented, clean-as-hell social media app. Similar to other microblogging services, with one truly killer.
Click the cog on the home screen, and a popup with 3 inputs shows. Each one labeling a percentage of how much of content you want tyour feed to look like.
Default it is 40% accounts you follow, 30% is follows of accounts you follow, and 30% is everything else.
As someone pointed out, there is already a following tab! So I updated my percentages to be 0% follows, 30% follows of follows, and 70% everything else.
Jump to heading The chronological timeline
Several years back, Twitter (they were still Twitter then) announced the return of the chronological timeline. Since when was it not chronological, I say to myself. Turns out, the timeline was almost entirely algorithmically based to improve how ads were displayed to users. This means no more ads showing up right underneath inflammatory posts, and better delivery of ads through engagement metrics.
Being able to have a chronological timeline by default, the following tab, as well as algorithmically curated content is refreshing. It's going to pave the way for the next generation of social media.
My official stance is that social media peaked at forums, and their final form is everyone having their own blog. RSS isn't dead y'all!
Jump to heading It's going to start a revolution I say!
Clearly the app is going through some nutty expansion, just announcing they're at 500k users. 3 days prior announcing they had hit 300k users. Is this due to the customize feed feature? No.
It's probably to do with the community, the lack of AI, the Glaze feature that helps preserve users images from being slurped up by AI, and the fact that artists on the internet feel disenfranchised by the existing social media networks, whose algorithms change without notice and threaten their livelihood.
If you're thinking of signing up, I recommend also dropping a couple bucks their way, like her at buymeacoffee. If you don't trust that link (and you probably shouldn't send money to random links on the internet), when you sign up, click on your profile picture in the top right and click on the link with the orange icon that says "Buy Us a Coffee".