Escaping the Meta Walled Garden - part ∞

A Fun illustrated Pelican sitting on a rock giving a quizzical look at the viewer. Image by Nicobou on DeviantArt

There's a movement on Instagram right now to move off the platform and the current destination is a very new app called Cara. Myself being locked into that abusive relationship called Ig user, I promptly signed up and added my account there!

Though this is unlikely to succeed, I'm doing my part again. The prisoners in Ig want to leave but, they have wanted to do that since Meta took over and slapped on the shackles. The last big push was back in 2018 when the cosplay community (and others) left Ig in what might have been the biggest social walkout prior to the Xitter migration. Tired of the crap algo, the shadow banning of posts and many other grievances, we left for the promise land of Vero.

It was an amazing time, my feed was full of cosplay and fantasy content, it felt like IG just migrated. And Vero is pretty good! Nice features, good UI and some interesting social angles. It looked like we might escape. Then the inevitable happened. Server overload. Little Vero isn't a mega Corp and they were in an early beta, Servers crashed, login failed and people couldn't sign up. This halted the migration at the height of it's momentum and the wind was sucked out of the movement. People stayed..cross posting on both and hoping for things to get sorted out.

Scaling up a service takes time, and back in 2018 us users were naively spoiled by mega Corp server capacity and response time. Those who didn't understand server architecture and what it takes to runs big photo sharing site complained and quickly declared the Exodus a failure. Switching costs kicked in, IGs secret weapon of containment. And with in a few months Vero went quiet... A few of us kept posting but, the writing was on the wall and the task of cross posting was of course manual and tedious. Vero died for the cosplay community. I was just there today, it's still going but it looks like a ghost town at first glance.

Now Meta in it's endless ability to extract value from its prisoners had brought us the plastic future of AI and will be indiscriminately feeding it's shit machine with our content. Sorry you can't opt out, you must like it. As if that weren't bad enough, meta keeps terrorizing it's prisoners with Rando-ban where it randomly selects a collection of a users posts and marks them as inappropriate and locks their account up. This prevention to post random things is just a form of control and funny enough the deviant user is still able to post stories and can display what's being banned so everyone can see that there is no violations and the content being banned is some times older content and also often in the same theme as prior content that is not being banned.

The prisoners in the Ig lockup are protesting and retaliation is swift. What to do? Leave for Cara.

Currently it doesn't feel quite like the 2018 Exodus but, the story is the same. People are posting that they have accounts on Cara and come follow there. People are moving, I'm there as well cross posting like it's 2018. Also as expected, little Cara is getting over run. Slow servers, problems posting and new users can't sign up. Will this be another Vero moment? A failed Exodus? Only time will tell. Are users more tech savvy and ready to walk the hard road? Or will they give up and accept the shackles... again.

I'm cheering for us all, we either succeed or fail together. I want off but, it's lonely out there without the lively communities in the IG lockup. Ever the optimist, I'll try again.

And I just read that Cara hit 800k users! You go Cara!