Key points:
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Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
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Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
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Cara’s Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a ‘Portfolio’ feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
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While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
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Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI
more about: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
I think the problem is both technical and cultural. I use both Mastodon and Bluesky pretty regularly, and am dipping my toes back into Lemmy after the instance I used has seemingly died. A lot of the technical and cultural problems the fediverse and specifically Mastodon - being the most well-known ActivityPub project - has, that made people flock to Bluesky instead (during a time when invite codes were needed, adding a layer of friction to joining Bluesky at the time), is well-documented on this post by Erin Kissane.
The tl;dr: fractured federation amongst other problems, and a very scoldy audience turned these people away from Mastodon.
Hell I consider myself a very techy nerd, but I moved Mastodon instances after being frustrated with the inherent lossiness of federation with ActivityPub on the Masto instance I used to be on, which sucks because the instance I was on had no other problems.