Turbo Island, the bootleg illustrator and cult merch creative, is one of the now 800,000 users on Cara. “My decision to get the app wasn’t very calculated,” Turbo Island tells us. “I saw a few people I’ve always admired get on board (Bráulio Amado, Adam Higton, Jiro Bevis). And I went full sheep mode and did the same. I don’t think they know why they are there either.”
We have, sadly, seen this pattern before. Over the past few years, there has been a rush to find ‘the next social media for visual creatives’. There are, of course, highly popular options like Behance on the table, but discourse is focused on finding an option that will house the creative content Instagram usually would, without the downsides. Most memorably, in 2022, creatives threatened to move to Vero in protest of Instagram’s decision to prioritise Reels over feed posts, and yet, we never seem to get closer to a viable alternative. Despite users joining Vero in their droves – back in 2018, 500,000 users even joined Vero within 24 hours in the US alone – it never broke into the mainstream. So why is it so hard to pull off?
When talking to Turbo, it becomes clear you need to strike gold to gain enough users quickly to reach a critical mass. “Lots of people have gone to Cara as an AI safe space. [But] by looking at Cara’s own Instagram account, it’s very clear they like totally different art to me anyway,” Turbo says. “Lots of ethereal digital fantasy stuff done on iPads. So maybe I’ll feel like I don’t belong and leave next week.”
