Serious question, what is Pinterest actually for?

Like a virtual corkboard or whatever?

I've recently installed karakeep (previously hoarder) for collecting images and idea boards. I haven't had time to play around with it so much can't say what it's like, but it came up a lot in other discussions of Pinterest alternatives. Also, you need to o selfhost, but if you want something free and not funded by ads, that's pretty much a given.

Tbh, I also don't know if it's FOSS, but it is free to use and if you self host you can control its access.

You kinda gotta decide on one thing to focus on. No one platform can fullfill all of those unless its a fediverse platform.

Also, if its open then companies can train their AIs on it.

If the software used to host it is open source, that doesnt mean its ethical or free of ads because if its run by a corporation with financial interests then they wont care about that.

If you want a long term art platform that is free, open source, censorship resistant and non commercial, then your only real bet is something thats fediverse/decentralized and run by random users.

Otherwise its always going to be enshittified. I havent heard of any other image focused fediverse platforms apart from pixelfed and thats just not what you want i think?

https://alternativeto.net/software/pinterest/

Use the filter to narrow it to open source software. You can also select self-hosted, Linux/Windows/MacOS, or iOS/Android.

Not FOSS but Cara is a great anti ai art platform

I'm thinking you're already on it.

But have you checked out bluesky?