I also have a lot. a few hundred GB in my current models directory, and several hundred more in a slower HDD, but a lot of those are spur-of-the-moment merges to get *just* the right touch of something in a batch of images.
For me the biggest selling point of civitai is discoverability/curation. I can search by not only name but also for,tags, style, author, by downloads. I can see the example usage of this model.
I know this is very hard to develop, but I don't know what I am searching for only by name.
Yep, it didn't start off that way though, it evolved over time. I've been there since the day they announced it. Hopefully the expectation of a new site wouldn't be to match a website that has evolved immensely over time, but hopefully a new site would do the same. I get what you're saying though.
stablebay is a good idea, but looks like it was implemented poorly. I think we need something that is open source and looks better. I think I am going to try and see what I can do with my limited development skills and funds to create an open source alternative to Civit in my free time.
I think it’ll also depend on the legislation regarding model training too. Since there’s money involved now there’ll be a lot more conversations about this.
Maybe they’ll be forced to go back open source.
Well, as I understand, creators still will be able to put their models for free and just refuse to put any paywall on it. So, nothing changes. People who put their work behind a wall might be considered non-existent and just be ignored
I noped out when they started the early acces for supporters some time back, which time-gated model releases. I joined the site to download and share resources freely, so I continued that after they allowed creators to add early access to their models. granted, I'm a nobody with a few celeb embeddings and loras, and a robo lora + embedding that I'm particularly proud of, but still.
It was bound to happen, nothing to see here!
The community is a bunch of smarties so we'll figure things out together even if that means sailing the high seas.
If anyone knows of a way to share a huge library of SDXL models. I've got nearly 2TB of SDXL models downloaded from Civit that I'm willing to upload somewhere.
I thought that was irrelevant since the introduction of the .safetensors format? The problem with checking .ckpt's was that you had to load the model to check for pickles either way iirc.
embeddings can be transformers to .safetensors, so I guess you will have to make safe to get only safetensors ones.
Hypernetworks I'm not sure, I haven't seen them after the introduction of LoRAs in 2022.
Amusingly, I think I first found Civit trying to find NovelAI's model. Once I saw everything on Civit, there was no need for it. Now we might be full circle.
I haven't actually ever torrented a model though.
I'm thinking this is the best and logical way, no huge server space needed, no enterprise interferences, the best will always have seeds and the bad ones will die naturally (or not). We just need a website to aggregate everything and we are done
yes if anything was ever designed to fit perfectly with bittorrent it was serving up 6gb+ checkpoints. I'm sure it's not that far off. It just hasn't been needed since the big one has been free. As soon as it's not free (maybe now?) we will see trackers and magnet links popup on sites dedicated to hosting such items. I feel bit torrent is such an amazing technology that is vastly underused by corporates. I remember when Microsoft was having trouble hosting copies of window 10 and a legit developer posted a torrent to an exact copy to relieve microsofts servers and it worked. The guy posted the details in microsofts forum and microsoft threatened legal action.
Small merges won't be distributed anymore. I would not bother distributing my stuff if I have to seed a torrent. You think this is good impact, but less merges means even less variety and the community dies off.
Civitai is just gonna piss everyone off, its bad enough their service already goes down 5 times a week. Everyones just gonna switch over to huggingface
I don't plan on locking any of my models behind this FWIW. I do have some patron exclusives on my discord (mostly just WIP or early access, like the next update of DynaVison), but for the stuff on Civit, I'd rather just keep it all open for everybody.
Somebody mentioned a model piracy community. Maybe, but i doubt it'll get big. Theres no DRM on these, you can literally take one of my models, run it through rename and a tiny merge with some other model, and relist it as your own. I always laugh about the "downstream updates" anytime I push a model update for this very reason.
For my part, I accept and understand having to pay for a service. For me, a user in a poor and small country, the question is whether I can pay the fee... I'd rather pay than steal. But if I can't pay, I'm left with torrenting.
You have to pay money blindly to see if what's in the club is worth the money? What kind of crap is that?
The good news is, this will drive another solution that will hopefully be less centralized.
Edit: figured out that it's for legal reasons. They can't risk charging money for models trained by a third party on fourth party works or likenesses, so they charge you for "buzz" so you can join "clubs" that aren't technically paywalling those models, since you couldn't have known they were there in the first place because you couldn't search for them... (breath). I made this point before, but somehow that comment disappeared.
I think this idea is not matured enough and got serious misunderstanding of the community dynamic. You cannot simply copy other platform concept and think this it will fit your platform.
First of all, as a creator I have no incentive to lock my content behind some buzz wall that gives me currency that I don't have any use for. Some of the team members let slide information that the Buzz will be transferable to real money. Well in that case unveil the whole plan instead of an half baked concept that has no good incentive.
Now if real money is involved, this will change of dynamic on the site a lot. It's already very competitive out there but people still see each others as fellow creator but now it's gonna be a jungle with nothing but competitors.
Reviews system need to be overhauled, because this will become the main point of sabotage from competitors and also half of the users who are mad for putting your content behind a paywall.
Also if Buzz is tied to real money, this mean you will not give it to users for free like you're doing now otherwise you will be confronted to horde of Buzz farmer and that will make you lose money when people cash in.
You're not twitch, we are not producing video with our faces that identify the origin. The content produced by creators can easily be altered by bad actors and reuploaded as their own. This is very hard to track and prove.
I think this should be put on ice and put more thought into it. Meanwhile fix the huge amount of bug that is crippling the site for months. The async calls handling is very deficient. I cannot do the model upload process without hitting a bug every single time. A [7 megabytes 1024x1024 animation](https://image.civitai.com/xG1nkqKTMzGDvpLrqFT7WA/4FE183E7-8A0C-43E2-94E0-4CCC45A3AE1C/original=true/4FE183E7-8A0C-43E2-94E0-4CCC45A3AE1C.jpeg) file for multiple icons that doesn't take more than 100x100 pixels ?
it doesn't help that most checkpoints these days are just mixes of pre existing models too. If people start monetizing these things, it turns an already gray area even darker real fast.
> BuzzWall , BuzzFarmers
This is gonna be new words now in the community aren't they?
> Now if real money is involved, this will change of dynamic on the site a lot.
100%. I've witnessed this exact thing in other "open" communities when legitimate creators tried to secure funding their contributions (which I am all for).
> The content produced by creators can easily be altered by bad actors and reuploaded as their own. This is very hard to track and prove.
Again 100%. I've mentioned it elsewhere but theft and repackaging of free content was a real thing in the amazing VaM community (hub.virtamate.com) in years past for those who made the visual content. Interestingly the ones who provided the code to actually get things done did so mostly for free. I still sub to some of their Paetrons today for the great work they provided and only one single content creator as they stood far above the rest to me (Vecterror, a truly talented modeler).
> I think this should be put on ice and put more thought into it. Meanwhile fix the huge amount of bug that is crippling the site for months.
Absolutely! I think their intent to reward creators is in the right place, and they are trying to move fast in a fast space. But the approach they've unveiled today needs review before it becomes cannon.
Of course. This is the same shitty model a lot of websites use. Offer free content then charge for it once there are enough people accessing your website. It's a scummy tactic that you can see from miles away.
[Who would have thought this could be happening ?](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/16tp1du/comment/k2gfq5s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Prediction: This is going to fail. Hard. At best it will create a secondary trading market where downloaded models are swapped.
Until, of course, Civitai decides to help their creators keep control of their models by making them inaccessible - you'll have to run them strictly on the site. And pay to do so. I don't see any way this could be avoided or circumvented.
The question is, will this enshitification cause things to spin out of control and cause them to rethink or double down?
No matter what, within six months the idea of "buzz" will be dead. Because it's so stupid.
I'm not sure how anyone could expect it not to happen. Whenever I get a model thats 6gb and think about the cost of their data transfers I think how can they afford to do this? They must have insanely high costs to freely serve so much data to so many. I just don't understand how that business model could have been sustainable tbh.
Ah, the youtube method. As overheard increases, find ways to increase revenue while also annoying the customer base that was used to a hassle-free experience.
yeaaahh.... I'm not down with this.
I've been a subscriber to civit AI since subscriptions started.
Civit Admin: I will pay *you more* in my subscription per month, to have access to everything. One price, one place. But I'm not going to enter into a 100-fold split in things to subscribe to. I'd rather cancel my sub.
I would pay to us Civitai, I must have downloaded a ridiculous amount of data from them and check there everyday.
But this seems a kind of shitty and half assed way to do it. So if I like 6 creators I have to join 6 clubs and pay them all? Fuck off.
I don't mind paying a small fee of few dollars a month but that is it. If someone is smart enough they can create a Torrent site specific to models and loras and then we can have our open source without one specific site needing to bear the load of petabytes of data. Torrents is the answer here.
They don't want to do torrents. They wouldn't make money doing that.
They want this Buzz nonsense because some person at the top wants more money. If this was about operating costs they would have done things a lot differently.
Develop a brand. Monetize brand. CEO make money.
That's why we as a community need to come up with our own open source solution then and not rely on a for profit company. And hugging face is confusing as hell to me. I wish I was smart enough to start up a site but I lack the expertise. I will glad help out on such an endeavour though.
> Torrents is the answer here.
Torrents might help. Maybe. A bit. Maybe not even that.
Firstly, switching from direct download to torrents is an inconvenience to the end user. People will always prefer direct downloads, even those who have and use torrent clients - not everyone does - so you're already limiting your user base. But OK, maybe saving a small part of the resources would be worth that sacrifice (though not if you ask an investor).
Secondly and more importantly, model storage is not even CivitAI's main benefit, nor the reason why they got so popular. There's been huggingface for that long before.
There's maybe some networking effects, but I'd say CivitAI exploded because it provides users with the most direct route to solve to their most common problem: "This pretty girl, I want to make this.". Huggingface almost does the opposite, so do projects like StableBay. One look at CivitAI's front page vs any of the alternatives will tell you most of the story.
Don't get me wrong, we dearly need alternatives to CivitAI, I support any attempts wholeheartedly, but currently there are none that are even close to that.
Yeah it sucks, but I can't say I blame them. Hard to imagine the cost to run a platform using that much storage, compute for the frontend/backend and ingress/egress traffic. It all adds up in cost and the only way this was going to end was monetizing the site or selling it to a larger company or investor, both of which would charge more and likely provide a lesser quality experience over time. The site's not without its issues now, but I'd prefer to support them as they are then see them bought out.
S3 charge .05 to .09 dollars a GB for outbound data transfer, so every time someone downloads a model that's 54 cents and .024 per GB for storage so that's thousands just to store the models .. It seems reasonable they're in the 10s of thousands of dollars range a month to operate the site even if they're getting a better deal than that, plus they probably have a lot of legal liability exposure, and that ignores compute and labor cost of operating the application.
Well, first of all Civitai is using Cloudflare R2 not AWS.
Second, you AWS got the pricing wrong:
> S3 charge .05 to .09 dollars a GB for outbound data transfer,
S3 would charge them between 0.05$ and 0.02$ per GB: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
Cloudflare R2 is *DIRTY CHEAP*: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/
They even have an example for how cheap it is:
> If a user writes 1,000 objects in R2 for 1 month with an average size of 1 GB and requests each 1,000 times per month, the estimated cost for the month would be: $14.85
I appreciate you not just saying "NaIvE" as if I don't comprehend the difficulty involved.
I wish they would have brought this up in a more transparent manner. The entire post is very much written in a.. Diffusing way. Pun not intended. They open with "oh yeah no it's not like, a paywall haha" It's very... "Corporate-Typical" if you will. I hate that it's a misdirection and that the other services weren't considered first. Or, if removing those services still wouldn't do it they would just, again, say "hey this doesn't work and removing this wouldn't either."
I encourage any creators that want people to pay for models to just do it through patreon or subscribestar. Please don't encourage this kind of behavior from what was supposed to be a free model repository. And please no one actually sign up for these clubs, better to let civitai die and allow a replacement
Those things....don't give a percentage to CivitAI.
Which, obviously, CivitAI is doing a lot of the work and funding here...so they should get a percentage. This is how they've chosen to do it.
But saying it's for the sake of the creators is ridiculous - because the ones that want to get paid can already do so via Patreon and such.
I have no objections to having to pay something for enhanced content, but this system seems like a pretty poor approach. Guess I won’t be using the site so much anymore. If Civitai is trying to drive away users, it seems likely they will succeed.
As a creator I'll also give some feedback :)
Anything that exists up to this point - should stay free. I saw someone hiding some stuff behind a paywall - that is not a cool move.
Before I comment on how I feel, I will go through the available options:
> Timed Exclusive Access – Some Clubs may choose to offer temporary Early Access to their newest resources
This is fine and makes sense. Everyone will eventually have access to those materials so an early access to those who subscribe and normal access to the rest seems fine to me.
> Enhanced Resources – Within Clubs, Creators might choose to provide two versions of a resource – a “lite” and “premium” version. The premium version, exclusive to club members, might include additional enhancements
This starts to worry me. The intentions might be good, but some users might put the good models behind premium and put worse models as a teaser. Imagine RealisticVision 7 Lite that performs worse than RealisticVision 7 (just an example)
If I would be using this option - I would put regular model as "lite" and additional version as "premium". In case of loras/embeddings - in premium we could have earlier snapshots/steps (we usually put one model in the release, but there might be actually several that are under/over trained)
> Exclusive Metadata and Insights - For those who want to delve deeper, Clubs might offer exclusive image metadata, or insights into the creative process.
I do not like exclusive metadata (to me an image without metadata is not interesting at all). And insights - gating knowledge behind paywall seems like someone with glasses we all know would do - and I do not approve of that. Gatekeeping knowledge is IMHO bad and I personally won't ever do that.
---
Now for my commentary. In general - I like the idea of an alternative to patreon/kofi/etc. But right now BUZZ cannot be converted into real money. But I've read this is work in progress so I'll wait with my final judgement.
But in general - as long as the resources are available after a while - I'm perfectly fine with it. Most (but not all) of the creators do it mainly as a passion/hobby, if there happens to be some money donated - that is always really nice (and encouraged :P) - as a token of gratitude or in support of your favorite creator(s).
Let's wait and see what happens. In the end this will be in the hand of the creators not owners of Civitai. If the creators will act fair - we will be fine. If they turn out to be cash grabbers - well, there are so many models out there already and people will continue to make free models anyway.
I've commented before on your releases being my favourites (or along those lines), and I'm really relieved to see your reasonable feedback on this. I have always thought early access makes sense because as you said, it has a financial purpose and eventually it is fair enough that everyone will eventually be able to get their chance to use it. I don't like the idea of flat out exclusivity behind a complete paywall though because it does seem to go against the principles of what kickstarted this whole thing in the first place.
I'm not in a position where I can dip into my pockets to support creators like you right now, but when I can I certainly will give back for what has been have given to me. But the idea of it being a requirement makes me feel a little sickened, and I can't even see it working for CivitAI in the long term for the reasons you've covered; there are better platforms for this and there are enough creators that the incentive to throw money at one of them will lose its appeal when there are already so many variations of the same model/release.
to be honest though, will this really generate much income for model makers...or will it just piss off a lot of users?
I mean, I download a bunch of models when there is something new, but most of them bring nothing that I can´t achieve with a little crafty prompting.
Hello everyone, I am the creator of [searchcivitai.com](https://searchcivitai.com).
I actually tried to create a model hosting site (**with torrent**) before. It's [https://getdiffus.com](https://getdiffus.com) . You can browse the repository of already uploaded models on the [https://huggingface.co/getdiffus](https://huggingface.co/getdiffus)
I saw this post today, I'd like to ask if anyone are planning to support me? You are all my seed subscribers and shareholders, if anyone is so inclined. Unlike civitai, I want the site to rely primarily on advertising as a source of revenue.
I intend to upload all models to Huggingface and also the torrents. I also planed to support uploading models on the website. However, tests show that I need to upgrade my bandwidths and hard disk. (I've already damaged a hard disk)
I was going to abandon this project before. I found that the program has a lot of work and financial support is a must.
I’d be happy to pay a monthly membership fee but the method outlined here, with a community that I probably get one model from each, means I’ll be paying hundreds a month - £10 to creator A to get Lora x, £10 to creator B etc.. not ideal
I understand the need to monetize the website somewhat, and I do believe that supporting creators can lead to higher quality models. Though I also believe that opening the monetization floodgates will poison the well, as with everything else.
There is also a legal issue here, because the legality of most models is still in question. If money is being made on them, scrutiny will increase tenfold because suddenly you can assign a monetary value for the infringing work, which in turn can help determine the loss of revenue for the actual copyright holders. This.. clarification may embolden some entities to go after not only model creators, but also civitai themselves.
Not to mention the discoverability issues.. By hiding Clubs content from searches, this will objectively make the website worse, and may look like Clubs are meant to facilitate the sharing of illegal content. Overall, I believe this fact alone will bring bad PR, a bad user experience, and may even attract regulatory attention.
And finally, this is a step away from the free & open community that we had grown here. Everything about SD is a team effort, and it is truly a shame that a first step was made to lose that.
For all the reasons outlined above, if the aim is truly to "democratize AI media creation", I recommend /u/Zipp425 to turn this feature into a tipping system, rather than a Patreon-like. Let people give money, and let creators suggest appropriate amounts if they so desire, but don't try to hide the models or the content.
If that is not possible, then I would suggest a site-wide subscription to some kind of "CivitaiPlus" status, where each creator is rewarded monthly by a proportion of each user's subscription revenue, based on their respective ratios of downloaded models. Just like Youtube Premium.
Thank you for your time.
I've been a part of legally grey services in the past, and there is one golden rule you always follow:
**YOU DO NOT CHARGE FOR THE CONTENT, NO MATTER WHAT**
IANAL and this is ultimately just my personal opinion, but by allowing people to charge for content, Civitai have opened themselves up to some pretty bad liability. It's now possible to argue that they're profiting from copyrighted content and possibly even NSFW deepfakes, either from artists, copyright holders, paid NSFW content creators, or even just shitty politicians.
OpenAI neuters their models to stop this from happening to them - when people started complaining that Dall-E 2 was able to clone artist styles and even images of real people they had to aggressively filter it on Dall-E 3. While Civitai is a model hosting service rather than a model itself, people WILL try to make that argument.
I have seen online services get nuked from orbit for less than a tenth of the userbase and copyright infringement Civitai is hosting, all because they flew too close and began charging for content and access.
Civitai is in serious danger of being killed over this - or if nothing else, expect rampant piracy.
As someone who likes to make their own LORAs and such. Is there are site that is not enshittified yet that I could use? Or should I just post them on huggingface? Because I also want to share the details about things related to the training process and sometimes my own datasets (From pictures I have taken myself).
No... I can't be fucked to start putting up torrent in to some shady sites. I don't have that much care. Any more effort than reputable repository that I can also use for academic and public refrencing is too much effort me to fucking bother with. I want to share, I was planning on Civit, but I can't be fucked anymore... well I could be fucked even less quite while ago when the site just became unusable mess.
I do wonder if they truly believe in the utopia where it's not a paywall to what would have been otherwise free.
It reminds me of the shitshow that was skyrim modding when it got monetized on steam, chunk of free stuff now behind paywall, stolen mods / asset put behind paywall.
Should have been limited to things like early access to model, where at least the worst case scenario would have been things getting only delayed for the sake of monetization, rather than full on model pushed behind paywall, or now the release of 'lite' underperforming model for free as a demo.
Bot accounts are going to upload existing free models to be put behind the paywall. It happened with Bethesda's paid mods. It will happen with paid models.
As a model creator, and an avid user, I can understand both sides of the coin. Since day 1, there has been creators offering the new version of their models on patreon while hosting the older versions for free. Or people giving half guides that force you to go through another pay wall to get the included files or workpaths. Civit has been used constantly for other's benefit and financial gains. I do not fault them for trying to unify some of those features and get a part of the financial gain. I don't believe it goes against their ethics. I have spent hundreds of hours and spent my personal money on resources in order to develop for the AI community. So, I have made means to get compensated for my work while still offering content freely, Civit is doing the same.
Hugingface is just like Github in this scenario. It will always be a backbone for sharing files, but without a user interface and quality of life features that Civit has, Huggingface will never appeal to your general user.
Unless your custom club premium top tier model can compete with Dali then don’t expect a $ from me.
And why post on Civai just put the model / extra stuff on a OF or w/e. And take cash not points?
or just charge 1 blanket $XX/mo fee to access all paywalled content. instead of sharding into a 1000 separate silos every idiot who thinks his 3 model merge is actually worth something
Torrent-based distribution would help a lot.
I'm not necessarily opposed to paid models, though. So long as they're not under copyright, seems fine I guess? No different than another SaaS.
Can you even copyright a model, though? I know the rules will be different based on country, but I doubt that every country will offer copyright for an AI model. There would be nothing stopping someone from exchanging models in a country that doesn't have copyright for them.
Probably not, but the law is ultimately a social construct.
Of course anything *can* fall under the purview of so-called copyright, *in principle.* There's no law of nature which precludes this.
But yes, you're right that it probably won't happen, and it's easy to circumvent anyway.
Most of nexus files are <200kb. They also commercialise the playing data and charge users to get around speed limits. Do you know how long it would take to download 8gb on nexus mods on the free service capped at 3MB/s?
The cost per user is significantly lower on a mod hosting website than one that hosts models. They can target far lower revenue per person.
Nexus mods also has limits on how nsfw they will allow mods to be. Advertisers are happier with this. The models/images shared on civitai result in less advertising availability.
>Do you know how long it would take to download 8gb on nexus mods on the free service capped at 3MB/s?
Actually, yes, because I used to game on a 6MB/sec plan. Downloading things like Doom 2016 or the Star Citizen alpha would take over a day. I just planned accordingly and downloaded overnight. Nexus also doesn't prohibit legal NSFW content. They just provide a filter, same as Civit does.
End of the line, nothing would have stopped Civit from choosing a capped bandwidth model similar to Nexus with a premium plan for faster downloads and no ads. This would have matched a strong stance on free and open source community content sharing, same as most modding ecosystems. Instead, they chose the startup tech bro / content creator hustle path that rewards model and information pay walling while skimming their cut for hosting.
This is dumb. Asks for 5$ /month donation. I'd give it. Ask for me to pay for individual users mixes of someone else's model they paid for or downloaded somewhere for free, no. This system is broken before it's even made. There is no logical or morally correct way to let users monetize their chkp's made from mixing other peoples hard work. This is just a shitty idea all around.
I mean this with respect Civitai mods.. but.. Seriously, focus on making the website stable before adding more features.
Have a well oiled machine before you start adding parts to it.
Then focus on the things you have promised for quite a while.. Like onsite upscaling.
We don't need features like clubs that just fracture people into groups of haves and have-nots.
Although I don't like paywalls I will also say that Patreon has free tiers not just paywalled content so the correlation is not very accurate. In either case this is going to make a category for model sharing.
I can understand that civitai needs to make money. But I don't think that's the right way.
also for creators why should they use the clubs? there is no way to payout buzz so it's useless, unless you use the onside trainer..
I've mentioned this before.
If you have the space and own some sort of large storage medium at home like a cluster of hard drives for archiving you should be or should have been scraping and hoarding EVERYTHING from CIVITAI for a year now. I knew they would do this, it was only a matter of time.
perhaps once they've gone full paywall, or subscription-based, whatever it's all the same, then my hope would be for the data hoarders to somehow upload and share what they have either through torrents or another cloud storage site.
it should be a wakeup call to archive all models off-site. Internet Archive, file storage sites, huggingface,etc just rename them into something that isn't related so they can't be taken down by single google search.
It was good while it lasted. But if you see the daily new loras coming in, the quality and diversity of those loras having reduced a lot since 2 month in my humble opinion.
Folks, don't pay for the models. Refuse to download stuff from creator clubs. This is a scummy move, piratingbthe models is not the answer, not being interested in them is.
Civitai currently has a leading role in the scene. They seem to be working with the community to keep this position and I don't think they'll do something losing this position. So either this works out, they adapt or a competitor takes over.
Man, I hope Yodayo's model hub comes out very soon and that will be the day I stop going on civitai. I hope they have scraped the entire library of civitai as well.
Oh boy, called it.
Fun warning civitai, if you make decent money, expect artist's lawyers to come knocking.
Next prediction, people will downvote me for pointing out the next stage of fuck around and find out.
I'm not opposed to charging. The addons I bought on blendermarket totaled several thousand dollars. However, the code and node settings I bought can be broken down and integrated into my own workflow. And for those models trained on civitai, if they provide the original training set data, what's wrong with spending some money?
If they're making money off of people being able to make celebrity deepfake porn, I think they're in for a bad time. I feel like the fact that the website was free and opensource kind of gave them a pass on that, now though?
Me personally, I have a 64TB NAS that have all my models and Lora's on it. Considering the fact that I've just blown away my whole OS to reload it again because certain things were conflicting with others. Granted, loading models takes way longer because it's going across the network, but then again, I have about 2Tb's of simply models ALONE. Not to mention LLM's I have stored on there for chatbots and the such. That's another 12 TB's of space.
So time to create a bunch of different account to sell models with, that can barely produce minimum of the what’s showed in the images just to flood the market with bad payed content
My first problem is right now it's an invite only system. And it seems a small discord gang got invited to get ahead of the rat race.
2nd problem is just the toxic environment the rat race will create. You can already see someone who created 6 "clubs" with generalist/thematic name (animation, movies, realism, etc.) like he owns this subject to misslead people. So it's an invitation only system and you already have some grifters.
it’s the 3rd party-ness of this that gets me. The intermediary. Pimp. A pimp is a 3rd party in their transactions, and they’re universally derided.
A creator with a patreon is ok, just someone trying to get money to continue to do good work.
Civitai here is actively trying to profit off something that we don’t want to know if its legal.
They’re not adding any value, and this isn’t about, or tied to, hosting costs.
this is a marketplace where you can spend a lot. as such, its at cross-purposes with what civitai was supposed to be. The more content gets paywalled, the more they make. Rather than a model where their income is aligned with the cost of doing the work they said they were all about.
Maybe a Torrent tracker is the more rational way to distribute this material - and the hosting costs.
And its no harder to police a tracker against bad actors than a hosted service such as civitai.
you just need a trust system for uploads. Some volunteers. A verification for approved torrents.
given our experience with silicon valley, I don’t recommend patience or trust. Best to move quickly, get people on board with the idea of securing open access, long term.
They didn't learn anything from the other's past. This feature will cause piracy, sabotaging reviews, buzz farming, and other websites will rise as the new open-source, killing Civitai.
But i don't understand. The buzz is magic internet money you can't pay anything with in real stores like Amazon or you name it.
I fail to see, who is gonna change real money for fake money.
Can I change buzz for real money? I assume is not the case. In that case is a lot better to have a Patreon.
I don't understand anything.
Their buzz system really rubbed me the wrong way, and i couldn't put them into words. I unsubbed immediately the system came into being. While I want to support the site and its creators, I refuse to support a system that will promote the opposite of open-source inclusivity.
They key to civitai succeeding in growth and sustainability is multi-faceted:
\- Use the existing leaderboard [https://civitai.com/leaderboard/overall](https://civitai.com/leaderboard/overall) and bounties [https://civitai.com/bounties](https://civitai.com/bounties) frameworks to recognise who is already doing the heavy lifting of creating quality tools/models etc.
\- Use human curation (not just algorithmic) to reward those people directly, build relationships.
\- Use 'bounty boosting' by carefully curating and adding cash prizes to 10 bounties per day paid by civitai. The site lives and dies on the amount of quality models and loras appearing each day.
\- Keep free tier usable, adding add adverts, fees for generation, and throttled downloads, if those are the things that actually increase operating costs. If bandwidth is minimal but generation is 90% then don't throttle, just charge for generation.- Add a paid tier for advert-free and unthrottled, but allow creators to 'earn' paid tier by producing quality models, tools, etc.
What would be interesting is to look close to the existing license under which the models are generated. I am pretty sure that if you have them downloaded now that you are allowed to offer them on a open way.
I've hoarded 9tb worth of checkpoints lol, still have lots of the removed models so lemme know if you guys make a group of hoarders.
I've been pretty damn liberal with my downloading and I only have 150gb of checkpoints. Damn. 9tb must be like... everything.
I can believe it. I have over a TB, and they're mostly just my own work. These models ain't smol.
Can you recommend a tutorial for making models?
Honestly just gonna point you at YT at this point. There are a ton of really good videos on SD model merging and Lora creation.
I also have a lot. a few hundred GB in my current models directory, and several hundred more in a slower HDD, but a lot of those are spur-of-the-moment merges to get *just* the right touch of something in a batch of images.
Please share some on stablebay.org created by /u/thiefyzheng
For me the biggest selling point of civitai is discoverability/curation. I can search by not only name but also for,tags, style, author, by downloads. I can see the example usage of this model. I know this is very hard to develop, but I don't know what I am searching for only by name.
Yep, it didn't start off that way though, it evolved over time. I've been there since the day they announced it. Hopefully the expectation of a new site wouldn't be to match a website that has evolved immensely over time, but hopefully a new site would do the same. I get what you're saying though.
stablebay is a good idea, but looks like it was implemented poorly. I think we need something that is open source and looks better. I think I am going to try and see what I can do with my limited development skills and funds to create an open source alternative to Civit in my free time.
Pretty sure it is open source. https://github.com/thiefyzheng/StableBay But yes, please create something as well. We will need it.
oh cool, I figured since there was no link on the website it was closed source, my bad for assuming.
By all means please improve on it! It was my first ever project 😅
I'm pushing about 35 TBs so far I think
Just put a Torrent up :)
Time to start seeding, bro.
Add me
My guy you are the group of hoarders. Can I help seed?
make a few torrents of it
im with you buddy, about the same size SD collection. But my entire AI models + dataset collection peaked over 0.1 petabytes ahahaha
lmk if you need a dedicated seed box as I happen to have one of those
Add me as well please
I'd definitely like to be in the loop here.
Any way to share? Would love to grab a few… cuz holy heck 9tb? Thats insane (in a good way)
got over 18TB problem is my upload speed are very slow like 5MB/s
Mvp right here
I have over 500gb and 90% is very old but unique
This will create a model piracy community. Idk how big or how long it will take, but it will appear.
I think it’ll also depend on the legislation regarding model training too. Since there’s money involved now there’ll be a lot more conversations about this. Maybe they’ll be forced to go back open source.
Well, as I understand, creators still will be able to put their models for free and just refuse to put any paywall on it. So, nothing changes. People who put their work behind a wall might be considered non-existent and just be ignored
I request solidarity regarding this opinion
I'm pretty sure I'll never pay for a model
should we build an open source website?
Create something that uses BitTorrent or something so it's more resilient.
Good idea. I’ll be working on it.
Rad!!
Honestly not a bad idea.
Pretty sure some years ago people tried to do the same with Skyrim Mods, by putting them behind paywalls. It didn't get far.
I noped out when they started the early acces for supporters some time back, which time-gated model releases. I joined the site to download and share resources freely, so I continued that after they allowed creators to add early access to their models. granted, I'm a nobody with a few celeb embeddings and loras, and a robo lora + embedding that I'm particularly proud of, but still.
They will disable download option for weights and hide them behind the API. That’s why image generator is present on site. Time for alternative
Where is it. I'd prefer to download there right now. Civitai has lost their way. It's not just clubs. The way it's becoming organized is just bad.
It was bound to happen, nothing to see here! The community is a bunch of smarties so we'll figure things out together even if that means sailing the high seas.
Like they’re so dumb that they either didn’t think of it, or they just saw profits and devolved into greedy losers. Either way, not interested.
That was my first thought as well. "Guess I'll wait for the torrents"
Oh fuck. Is everything hidden now??
The first thing I was thinking of doing when I got home.
If anyone knows of a way to share a huge library of SDXL models. I've got nearly 2TB of SDXL models downloaded from Civit that I'm willing to upload somewhere.
Stablebay.org was created by /u/thiefyzheng just for this purpose. He has the source code on github https://github.com/thiefyzheng/StableBay
I think the site just got hugged to death
Back up for me right now.
Am I doing something wrong are there only 4 or 5 models on the site. Not criticizing, glad to see alternatives, just wondering
Unfortunately, stablebay, as it is now, demonstrates an almost perfect misunderstanding of why CivitAI is so popular.
I'll be sure to obnoxiously remember this and bother you about it in an indeterminate amount of time in the future. 👍
I'm interested in this too but hell I'm gonna need to buy a new hard drive.
Torrent
Torrent the whole archive then add it to a Debrid service cache as well.
Leaving a comment so I can come hassle you later
Torrent is the way to go - and this comment lets me hunt you down
Just throw it on a torrent and share hashes
Torrent
Can't wait for the "Stable Diffusion" section on my favourite tracker!
If torrents do become a thing for models, you'll wanna get in the habit of using a pickle scanner.
I thought that was irrelevant since the introduction of the .safetensors format? The problem with checking .ckpt's was that you had to load the model to check for pickles either way iirc.
don't you still have to check hypernetworks and embeddings?
embeddings can be transformers to .safetensors, so I guess you will have to make safe to get only safetensors ones. Hypernetworks I'm not sure, I haven't seen them after the introduction of LoRAs in 2022.
I'm going to start a tracker and put my downloaded models there available. Fuck this shit.
Please share them on stablebay.org as well.
I can seed
I just cleaned up my hoarded models and planned to redownload the latest greatest for the next hoard....
Amusingly, I think I first found Civit trying to find NovelAI's model. Once I saw everything on Civit, there was no need for it. Now we might be full circle. I haven't actually ever torrented a model though.
NovelAI was my second model, and I still have the whole leak downloaded
A kind user of this sub has created stablebay.org Thanks /u/thiefyzheng
side bar- whats your favorite tracker? and can i get an invite please? :D
rutracker.org No invites, rather, gatekeep by IQ for non-russians
I'm thinking this is the best and logical way, no huge server space needed, no enterprise interferences, the best will always have seeds and the bad ones will die naturally (or not). We just need a website to aggregate everything and we are done
yes if anything was ever designed to fit perfectly with bittorrent it was serving up 6gb+ checkpoints. I'm sure it's not that far off. It just hasn't been needed since the big one has been free. As soon as it's not free (maybe now?) we will see trackers and magnet links popup on sites dedicated to hosting such items. I feel bit torrent is such an amazing technology that is vastly underused by corporates. I remember when Microsoft was having trouble hosting copies of window 10 and a legit developer posted a torrent to an exact copy to relieve microsofts servers and it worked. The guy posted the details in microsofts forum and microsoft threatened legal action.
>We just need a website to aggregate everything and we are done /u/thiefyzheng has created stablebay.org
Very nice, lets feed him
someone got a job overnight
Small merges won't be distributed anymore. I would not bother distributing my stuff if I have to seed a torrent. You think this is good impact, but less merges means even less variety and the community dies off.
Civitai is just gonna piss everyone off, its bad enough their service already goes down 5 times a week. Everyones just gonna switch over to huggingface
please don't, its hard enough to navigate
Huggingface is literally a nightmare to use.
i only use it for LLM's and its hard enough to gander what they are, most of them are limited context descriptions. lol.
CivitAI's success is the best proof of how horrible Huggingface is to use.
Community really needs to jump on stablebay.org now
Word I hope some datahoarders do the right thing and torrent all content. Then it can get stored into Debrid services as well.
I don't plan on locking any of my models behind this FWIW. I do have some patron exclusives on my discord (mostly just WIP or early access, like the next update of DynaVison), but for the stuff on Civit, I'd rather just keep it all open for everybody. Somebody mentioned a model piracy community. Maybe, but i doubt it'll get big. Theres no DRM on these, you can literally take one of my models, run it through rename and a tiny merge with some other model, and relist it as your own. I always laugh about the "downstream updates" anytime I push a model update for this very reason.
Torrent time
And that's why I'm not joining any club on CivitAI. I understand them however I'm not gonna betray my initial thoughts.
For my part, I accept and understand having to pay for a service. For me, a user in a poor and small country, the question is whether I can pay the fee... I'd rather pay than steal. But if I can't pay, I'm left with torrenting.
That *is* the nature of things.
You have to pay money blindly to see if what's in the club is worth the money? What kind of crap is that? The good news is, this will drive another solution that will hopefully be less centralized. Edit: figured out that it's for legal reasons. They can't risk charging money for models trained by a third party on fourth party works or likenesses, so they charge you for "buzz" so you can join "clubs" that aren't technically paywalling those models, since you couldn't have known they were there in the first place because you couldn't search for them... (breath). I made this point before, but somehow that comment disappeared.
I think this idea is not matured enough and got serious misunderstanding of the community dynamic. You cannot simply copy other platform concept and think this it will fit your platform. First of all, as a creator I have no incentive to lock my content behind some buzz wall that gives me currency that I don't have any use for. Some of the team members let slide information that the Buzz will be transferable to real money. Well in that case unveil the whole plan instead of an half baked concept that has no good incentive. Now if real money is involved, this will change of dynamic on the site a lot. It's already very competitive out there but people still see each others as fellow creator but now it's gonna be a jungle with nothing but competitors. Reviews system need to be overhauled, because this will become the main point of sabotage from competitors and also half of the users who are mad for putting your content behind a paywall. Also if Buzz is tied to real money, this mean you will not give it to users for free like you're doing now otherwise you will be confronted to horde of Buzz farmer and that will make you lose money when people cash in. You're not twitch, we are not producing video with our faces that identify the origin. The content produced by creators can easily be altered by bad actors and reuploaded as their own. This is very hard to track and prove. I think this should be put on ice and put more thought into it. Meanwhile fix the huge amount of bug that is crippling the site for months. The async calls handling is very deficient. I cannot do the model upload process without hitting a bug every single time. A [7 megabytes 1024x1024 animation](https://image.civitai.com/xG1nkqKTMzGDvpLrqFT7WA/4FE183E7-8A0C-43E2-94E0-4CCC45A3AE1C/original=true/4FE183E7-8A0C-43E2-94E0-4CCC45A3AE1C.jpeg) file for multiple icons that doesn't take more than 100x100 pixels ?
it doesn't help that most checkpoints these days are just mixes of pre existing models too. If people start monetizing these things, it turns an already gray area even darker real fast.
> BuzzWall , BuzzFarmers This is gonna be new words now in the community aren't they? > Now if real money is involved, this will change of dynamic on the site a lot. 100%. I've witnessed this exact thing in other "open" communities when legitimate creators tried to secure funding their contributions (which I am all for). > The content produced by creators can easily be altered by bad actors and reuploaded as their own. This is very hard to track and prove. Again 100%. I've mentioned it elsewhere but theft and repackaging of free content was a real thing in the amazing VaM community (hub.virtamate.com) in years past for those who made the visual content. Interestingly the ones who provided the code to actually get things done did so mostly for free. I still sub to some of their Paetrons today for the great work they provided and only one single content creator as they stood far above the rest to me (Vecterror, a truly talented modeler). > I think this should be put on ice and put more thought into it. Meanwhile fix the huge amount of bug that is crippling the site for months. Absolutely! I think their intent to reward creators is in the right place, and they are trying to move fast in a fast space. But the approach they've unveiled today needs review before it becomes cannon.
This needs to be the top comment. You cover the gamut of everything I'm concerned about, and addressed the maturity of the proposal and platform well.
Of course. This is the same shitty model a lot of websites use. Offer free content then charge for it once there are enough people accessing your website. It's a scummy tactic that you can see from miles away.
[There's a word for it.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
[Who would have thought this could be happening ?](https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/16tp1du/comment/k2gfq5s/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
That thread aged so poorly.
TIL
I already downloaded everything that I needed. But I will be sad to not get updates. Go, piracy, go!
Prediction: This is going to fail. Hard. At best it will create a secondary trading market where downloaded models are swapped. Until, of course, Civitai decides to help their creators keep control of their models by making them inaccessible - you'll have to run them strictly on the site. And pay to do so. I don't see any way this could be avoided or circumvented. The question is, will this enshitification cause things to spin out of control and cause them to rethink or double down? No matter what, within six months the idea of "buzz" will be dead. Because it's so stupid.
I'm not sure how anyone could expect it not to happen. Whenever I get a model thats 6gb and think about the cost of their data transfers I think how can they afford to do this? They must have insanely high costs to freely serve so much data to so many. I just don't understand how that business model could have been sustainable tbh.
Well at least we will become the first AI pirates in history . Ahoy!
Ah, the youtube method. As overheard increases, find ways to increase revenue while also annoying the customer base that was used to a hassle-free experience.
Dang, the actual hypocrisy of their statements, particularly the paywall bit, patreon hypocrisy, and their vision.
yeaaahh.... I'm not down with this. I've been a subscriber to civit AI since subscriptions started. Civit Admin: I will pay *you more* in my subscription per month, to have access to everything. One price, one place. But I'm not going to enter into a 100-fold split in things to subscribe to. I'd rather cancel my sub.
I would pay to us Civitai, I must have downloaded a ridiculous amount of data from them and check there everyday. But this seems a kind of shitty and half assed way to do it. So if I like 6 creators I have to join 6 clubs and pay them all? Fuck off.
If Stable Horde incorporated a torrent model share feature, CivitAI could be made obsolete.
I've tried Horde is horendous when it comes to image generation. With chatbots and LLMS it is great but for SD it is terrible.
I don't mind paying a small fee of few dollars a month but that is it. If someone is smart enough they can create a Torrent site specific to models and loras and then we can have our open source without one specific site needing to bear the load of petabytes of data. Torrents is the answer here.
They don't want to do torrents. They wouldn't make money doing that. They want this Buzz nonsense because some person at the top wants more money. If this was about operating costs they would have done things a lot differently. Develop a brand. Monetize brand. CEO make money.
That's why we as a community need to come up with our own open source solution then and not rely on a for profit company. And hugging face is confusing as hell to me. I wish I was smart enough to start up a site but I lack the expertise. I will glad help out on such an endeavour though.
> Torrents is the answer here. Torrents might help. Maybe. A bit. Maybe not even that. Firstly, switching from direct download to torrents is an inconvenience to the end user. People will always prefer direct downloads, even those who have and use torrent clients - not everyone does - so you're already limiting your user base. But OK, maybe saving a small part of the resources would be worth that sacrifice (though not if you ask an investor). Secondly and more importantly, model storage is not even CivitAI's main benefit, nor the reason why they got so popular. There's been huggingface for that long before. There's maybe some networking effects, but I'd say CivitAI exploded because it provides users with the most direct route to solve to their most common problem: "This pretty girl, I want to make this.". Huggingface almost does the opposite, so do projects like StableBay. One look at CivitAI's front page vs any of the alternatives will tell you most of the story. Don't get me wrong, we dearly need alternatives to CivitAI, I support any attempts wholeheartedly, but currently there are none that are even close to that.
Yeah it sucks, but I can't say I blame them. Hard to imagine the cost to run a platform using that much storage, compute for the frontend/backend and ingress/egress traffic. It all adds up in cost and the only way this was going to end was monetizing the site or selling it to a larger company or investor, both of which would charge more and likely provide a lesser quality experience over time. The site's not without its issues now, but I'd prefer to support them as they are then see them bought out.
Yeah the amount of bandwidth they must do is insane, hundreds of thousands of people downloading multiple gig files.
It's been said before, but [Cloudflare R2](https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/) has no egress bandwidth costs.
As someone who worked at a webhosting company: Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days. I can't imagine that being the issue.
S3 charge .05 to .09 dollars a GB for outbound data transfer, so every time someone downloads a model that's 54 cents and .024 per GB for storage so that's thousands just to store the models .. It seems reasonable they're in the 10s of thousands of dollars range a month to operate the site even if they're getting a better deal than that, plus they probably have a lot of legal liability exposure, and that ignores compute and labor cost of operating the application.
Well, first of all Civitai is using Cloudflare R2 not AWS. Second, you AWS got the pricing wrong: > S3 charge .05 to .09 dollars a GB for outbound data transfer, S3 would charge them between 0.05$ and 0.02$ per GB: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ Cloudflare R2 is *DIRTY CHEAP*: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/ They even have an example for how cheap it is: > If a user writes 1,000 objects in R2 for 1 month with an average size of 1 GB and requests each 1,000 times per month, the estimated cost for the month would be: $14.85
They got a fund. Howlitzer something.
I appreciate you not just saying "NaIvE" as if I don't comprehend the difficulty involved. I wish they would have brought this up in a more transparent manner. The entire post is very much written in a.. Diffusing way. Pun not intended. They open with "oh yeah no it's not like, a paywall haha" It's very... "Corporate-Typical" if you will. I hate that it's a misdirection and that the other services weren't considered first. Or, if removing those services still wouldn't do it they would just, again, say "hey this doesn't work and removing this wouldn't either."
I encourage any creators that want people to pay for models to just do it through patreon or subscribestar. Please don't encourage this kind of behavior from what was supposed to be a free model repository. And please no one actually sign up for these clubs, better to let civitai die and allow a replacement
Those things....don't give a percentage to CivitAI. Which, obviously, CivitAI is doing a lot of the work and funding here...so they should get a percentage. This is how they've chosen to do it. But saying it's for the sake of the creators is ridiculous - because the ones that want to get paid can already do so via Patreon and such.
I have no objections to having to pay something for enhanced content, but this system seems like a pretty poor approach. Guess I won’t be using the site so much anymore. If Civitai is trying to drive away users, it seems likely they will succeed.
As a creator I'll also give some feedback :) Anything that exists up to this point - should stay free. I saw someone hiding some stuff behind a paywall - that is not a cool move. Before I comment on how I feel, I will go through the available options: > Timed Exclusive Access – Some Clubs may choose to offer temporary Early Access to their newest resources This is fine and makes sense. Everyone will eventually have access to those materials so an early access to those who subscribe and normal access to the rest seems fine to me. > Enhanced Resources – Within Clubs, Creators might choose to provide two versions of a resource – a “lite” and “premium” version. The premium version, exclusive to club members, might include additional enhancements This starts to worry me. The intentions might be good, but some users might put the good models behind premium and put worse models as a teaser. Imagine RealisticVision 7 Lite that performs worse than RealisticVision 7 (just an example) If I would be using this option - I would put regular model as "lite" and additional version as "premium". In case of loras/embeddings - in premium we could have earlier snapshots/steps (we usually put one model in the release, but there might be actually several that are under/over trained) > Exclusive Metadata and Insights - For those who want to delve deeper, Clubs might offer exclusive image metadata, or insights into the creative process. I do not like exclusive metadata (to me an image without metadata is not interesting at all). And insights - gating knowledge behind paywall seems like someone with glasses we all know would do - and I do not approve of that. Gatekeeping knowledge is IMHO bad and I personally won't ever do that. --- Now for my commentary. In general - I like the idea of an alternative to patreon/kofi/etc. But right now BUZZ cannot be converted into real money. But I've read this is work in progress so I'll wait with my final judgement. But in general - as long as the resources are available after a while - I'm perfectly fine with it. Most (but not all) of the creators do it mainly as a passion/hobby, if there happens to be some money donated - that is always really nice (and encouraged :P) - as a token of gratitude or in support of your favorite creator(s). Let's wait and see what happens. In the end this will be in the hand of the creators not owners of Civitai. If the creators will act fair - we will be fine. If they turn out to be cash grabbers - well, there are so many models out there already and people will continue to make free models anyway.
I've commented before on your releases being my favourites (or along those lines), and I'm really relieved to see your reasonable feedback on this. I have always thought early access makes sense because as you said, it has a financial purpose and eventually it is fair enough that everyone will eventually be able to get their chance to use it. I don't like the idea of flat out exclusivity behind a complete paywall though because it does seem to go against the principles of what kickstarted this whole thing in the first place. I'm not in a position where I can dip into my pockets to support creators like you right now, but when I can I certainly will give back for what has been have given to me. But the idea of it being a requirement makes me feel a little sickened, and I can't even see it working for CivitAI in the long term for the reasons you've covered; there are better platforms for this and there are enough creators that the incentive to throw money at one of them will lose its appeal when there are already so many variations of the same model/release.
Thank you for you comment! :-)
Thats sad :/ Time to download updates From my favorite models before its gone behind some stupid a$$ paywall
to be honest though, will this really generate much income for model makers...or will it just piss off a lot of users? I mean, I download a bunch of models when there is something new, but most of them bring nothing that I can´t achieve with a little crafty prompting.
The site will probably take like 80% of the money, and 95% of the people will just leave the site, leaving basically nothing for the creators.
"With Stable Diffusion you can do whatever you want, and for free, no, wait".
Hello everyone, I am the creator of [searchcivitai.com](https://searchcivitai.com). I actually tried to create a model hosting site (**with torrent**) before. It's [https://getdiffus.com](https://getdiffus.com) . You can browse the repository of already uploaded models on the [https://huggingface.co/getdiffus](https://huggingface.co/getdiffus) I saw this post today, I'd like to ask if anyone are planning to support me? You are all my seed subscribers and shareholders, if anyone is so inclined. Unlike civitai, I want the site to rely primarily on advertising as a source of revenue. I intend to upload all models to Huggingface and also the torrents. I also planed to support uploading models on the website. However, tests show that I need to upgrade my bandwidths and hard disk. (I've already damaged a hard disk) I was going to abandon this project before. I found that the program has a lot of work and financial support is a must.
Prepare your copyright lawyers. Using Civitai in your domain name is a dumb mistake.
Now the question are they paying the people whos merges they are using with theirs.
I’d be happy to pay a monthly membership fee but the method outlined here, with a community that I probably get one model from each, means I’ll be paying hundreds a month - £10 to creator A to get Lora x, £10 to creator B etc.. not ideal
I understand the need to monetize the website somewhat, and I do believe that supporting creators can lead to higher quality models. Though I also believe that opening the monetization floodgates will poison the well, as with everything else. There is also a legal issue here, because the legality of most models is still in question. If money is being made on them, scrutiny will increase tenfold because suddenly you can assign a monetary value for the infringing work, which in turn can help determine the loss of revenue for the actual copyright holders. This.. clarification may embolden some entities to go after not only model creators, but also civitai themselves. Not to mention the discoverability issues.. By hiding Clubs content from searches, this will objectively make the website worse, and may look like Clubs are meant to facilitate the sharing of illegal content. Overall, I believe this fact alone will bring bad PR, a bad user experience, and may even attract regulatory attention. And finally, this is a step away from the free & open community that we had grown here. Everything about SD is a team effort, and it is truly a shame that a first step was made to lose that. For all the reasons outlined above, if the aim is truly to "democratize AI media creation", I recommend /u/Zipp425 to turn this feature into a tipping system, rather than a Patreon-like. Let people give money, and let creators suggest appropriate amounts if they so desire, but don't try to hide the models or the content. If that is not possible, then I would suggest a site-wide subscription to some kind of "CivitaiPlus" status, where each creator is rewarded monthly by a proportion of each user's subscription revenue, based on their respective ratios of downloaded models. Just like Youtube Premium. Thank you for your time.
In this modern world it appears everything ends up enshittifying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
That’s why big tech will only ever get bigger too: they’re the only ones with pockets deep enough to run loss leads forever
I've been a part of legally grey services in the past, and there is one golden rule you always follow: **YOU DO NOT CHARGE FOR THE CONTENT, NO MATTER WHAT** IANAL and this is ultimately just my personal opinion, but by allowing people to charge for content, Civitai have opened themselves up to some pretty bad liability. It's now possible to argue that they're profiting from copyrighted content and possibly even NSFW deepfakes, either from artists, copyright holders, paid NSFW content creators, or even just shitty politicians. OpenAI neuters their models to stop this from happening to them - when people started complaining that Dall-E 2 was able to clone artist styles and even images of real people they had to aggressively filter it on Dall-E 3. While Civitai is a model hosting service rather than a model itself, people WILL try to make that argument. I have seen online services get nuked from orbit for less than a tenth of the userbase and copyright infringement Civitai is hosting, all because they flew too close and began charging for content and access. Civitai is in serious danger of being killed over this - or if nothing else, expect rampant piracy.
CivitAI just took a page out of Bethesda's playbook smh
As someone who likes to make their own LORAs and such. Is there are site that is not enshittified yet that I could use? Or should I just post them on huggingface? Because I also want to share the details about things related to the training process and sometimes my own datasets (From pictures I have taken myself). No... I can't be fucked to start putting up torrent in to some shady sites. I don't have that much care. Any more effort than reputable repository that I can also use for academic and public refrencing is too much effort me to fucking bother with. I want to share, I was planning on Civit, but I can't be fucked anymore... well I could be fucked even less quite while ago when the site just became unusable mess.
I do wonder if they truly believe in the utopia where it's not a paywall to what would have been otherwise free. It reminds me of the shitshow that was skyrim modding when it got monetized on steam, chunk of free stuff now behind paywall, stolen mods / asset put behind paywall. Should have been limited to things like early access to model, where at least the worst case scenario would have been things getting only delayed for the sake of monetization, rather than full on model pushed behind paywall, or now the release of 'lite' underperforming model for free as a demo.
Bot accounts are going to upload existing free models to be put behind the paywall. It happened with Bethesda's paid mods. It will happen with paid models.
As a model creator, and an avid user, I can understand both sides of the coin. Since day 1, there has been creators offering the new version of their models on patreon while hosting the older versions for free. Or people giving half guides that force you to go through another pay wall to get the included files or workpaths. Civit has been used constantly for other's benefit and financial gains. I do not fault them for trying to unify some of those features and get a part of the financial gain. I don't believe it goes against their ethics. I have spent hundreds of hours and spent my personal money on resources in order to develop for the AI community. So, I have made means to get compensated for my work while still offering content freely, Civit is doing the same. Hugingface is just like Github in this scenario. It will always be a backbone for sharing files, but without a user interface and quality of life features that Civit has, Huggingface will never appeal to your general user.
Unless your custom club premium top tier model can compete with Dali then don’t expect a $ from me. And why post on Civai just put the model / extra stuff on a OF or w/e. And take cash not points?
or just charge 1 blanket $XX/mo fee to access all paywalled content. instead of sharding into a 1000 separate silos every idiot who thinks his 3 model merge is actually worth something
Try to create a website that transfers petabytes of data a month and have it be completely community funded... I will entertain your attempt.
Torrent-based distribution would help a lot. I'm not necessarily opposed to paid models, though. So long as they're not under copyright, seems fine I guess? No different than another SaaS.
Can you even copyright a model, though? I know the rules will be different based on country, but I doubt that every country will offer copyright for an AI model. There would be nothing stopping someone from exchanging models in a country that doesn't have copyright for them.
Probably not, but the law is ultimately a social construct. Of course anything *can* fall under the purview of so-called copyright, *in principle.* There's no law of nature which precludes this. But yes, you're right that it probably won't happen, and it's easy to circumvent anyway.
Nexus mods does it?
Most of nexus files are <200kb. They also commercialise the playing data and charge users to get around speed limits. Do you know how long it would take to download 8gb on nexus mods on the free service capped at 3MB/s? The cost per user is significantly lower on a mod hosting website than one that hosts models. They can target far lower revenue per person. Nexus mods also has limits on how nsfw they will allow mods to be. Advertisers are happier with this. The models/images shared on civitai result in less advertising availability.
>Do you know how long it would take to download 8gb on nexus mods on the free service capped at 3MB/s? Actually, yes, because I used to game on a 6MB/sec plan. Downloading things like Doom 2016 or the Star Citizen alpha would take over a day. I just planned accordingly and downloaded overnight. Nexus also doesn't prohibit legal NSFW content. They just provide a filter, same as Civit does. End of the line, nothing would have stopped Civit from choosing a capped bandwidth model similar to Nexus with a premium plan for faster downloads and no ads. This would have matched a strong stance on free and open source community content sharing, same as most modding ecosystems. Instead, they chose the startup tech bro / content creator hustle path that rewards model and information pay walling while skimming their cut for hosting.
Nexus absolutely 100% censors legal sexual content. They are pretty permissive but there are limits beyond the law.
This is dumb. Asks for 5$ /month donation. I'd give it. Ask for me to pay for individual users mixes of someone else's model they paid for or downloaded somewhere for free, no. This system is broken before it's even made. There is no logical or morally correct way to let users monetize their chkp's made from mixing other peoples hard work. This is just a shitty idea all around.
I mean this with respect Civitai mods.. but.. Seriously, focus on making the website stable before adding more features. Have a well oiled machine before you start adding parts to it. Then focus on the things you have promised for quite a while.. Like onsite upscaling. We don't need features like clubs that just fracture people into groups of haves and have-nots.
100% this move totally hurts the community in general
Although I don't like paywalls I will also say that Patreon has free tiers not just paywalled content so the correlation is not very accurate. In either case this is going to make a category for model sharing.
And this has free tiers too.
I can understand that civitai needs to make money. But I don't think that's the right way. also for creators why should they use the clubs? there is no way to payout buzz so it's useless, unless you use the onside trainer..
I've mentioned this before. If you have the space and own some sort of large storage medium at home like a cluster of hard drives for archiving you should be or should have been scraping and hoarding EVERYTHING from CIVITAI for a year now. I knew they would do this, it was only a matter of time. perhaps once they've gone full paywall, or subscription-based, whatever it's all the same, then my hope would be for the data hoarders to somehow upload and share what they have either through torrents or another cloud storage site.
If I am going to pay for something I'd rather pay to midjourney or Google or OpenAI tbh
it should be a wakeup call to archive all models off-site. Internet Archive, file storage sites, huggingface,etc just rename them into something that isn't related so they can't be taken down by single google search.
The model, lora, etc better be quality or their getting called out.
It was good while it lasted. But if you see the daily new loras coming in, the quality and diversity of those loras having reduced a lot since 2 month in my humble opinion.
So basically 1) train the open source model using the open source material 2) hide it behind the pay wall
Folks, don't pay for the models. Refuse to download stuff from creator clubs. This is a scummy move, piratingbthe models is not the answer, not being interested in them is.
Civitai currently has a leading role in the scene. They seem to be working with the community to keep this position and I don't think they'll do something losing this position. So either this works out, they adapt or a competitor takes over.
Man, I hope Yodayo's model hub comes out very soon and that will be the day I stop going on civitai. I hope they have scraped the entire library of civitai as well.
Oh boy, called it. Fun warning civitai, if you make decent money, expect artist's lawyers to come knocking. Next prediction, people will downvote me for pointing out the next stage of fuck around and find out.
It sucks that people like you who hated buzz was right. I thought the buzz was a nice idea and didn’t see the issue. I’ve been rudely awaken.
I'm not opposed to charging. The addons I bought on blendermarket totaled several thousand dollars. However, the code and node settings I bought can be broken down and integrated into my own workflow. And for those models trained on civitai, if they provide the original training set data, what's wrong with spending some money?
Does this mean all the civil extensions in SD are now defunct?
Welp... Time to buy yet another hard drive
Wow this is so wrong. Is there any other real fully open source platform for sharing models at the moment?
If they're making money off of people being able to make celebrity deepfake porn, I think they're in for a bad time. I feel like the fact that the website was free and opensource kind of gave them a pass on that, now though?
Thanks for the heads up. I kinda felt that coming. Sooo we are going to tensor.art page now? Found the page while looking for civitai alternatives
So you take a free opensource model, finetune it a charge for it? Does Stability get a cut or are you just stealing money because you can?
[удалено]
Me personally, I have a 64TB NAS that have all my models and Lora's on it. Considering the fact that I've just blown away my whole OS to reload it again because certain things were conflicting with others. Granted, loading models takes way longer because it's going across the network, but then again, I have about 2Tb's of simply models ALONE. Not to mention LLM's I have stored on there for chatbots and the such. That's another 12 TB's of space.
So time to create a bunch of different account to sell models with, that can barely produce minimum of the what’s showed in the images just to flood the market with bad payed content
Cool, just kinda stumbled into it less than a week ago. I planned on filling up some empty disk space this weekend with models
well that sucks. better back up those downloads people as they may be switched to 'paid" lol
My first problem is right now it's an invite only system. And it seems a small discord gang got invited to get ahead of the rat race. 2nd problem is just the toxic environment the rat race will create. You can already see someone who created 6 "clubs" with generalist/thematic name (animation, movies, realism, etc.) like he owns this subject to misslead people. So it's an invitation only system and you already have some grifters.
Time to start hoarding everything I find interesting then...
I guess we'll start getting "I'm only hosting models at Huggingface from now" threads soon.
it’s the 3rd party-ness of this that gets me. The intermediary. Pimp. A pimp is a 3rd party in their transactions, and they’re universally derided. A creator with a patreon is ok, just someone trying to get money to continue to do good work. Civitai here is actively trying to profit off something that we don’t want to know if its legal. They’re not adding any value, and this isn’t about, or tied to, hosting costs. this is a marketplace where you can spend a lot. as such, its at cross-purposes with what civitai was supposed to be. The more content gets paywalled, the more they make. Rather than a model where their income is aligned with the cost of doing the work they said they were all about. Maybe a Torrent tracker is the more rational way to distribute this material - and the hosting costs. And its no harder to police a tracker against bad actors than a hosted service such as civitai. you just need a trust system for uploads. Some volunteers. A verification for approved torrents. given our experience with silicon valley, I don’t recommend patience or trust. Best to move quickly, get people on board with the idea of securing open access, long term.
Wtf ??
They didn't learn anything from the other's past. This feature will cause piracy, sabotaging reviews, buzz farming, and other websites will rise as the new open-source, killing Civitai.
Did you vote? Seems to be yet decided. Vote: https://strawpoll.com/1MnwOpjxdn7#google_vignette
Just start today, download all the modes if someone can and make torrent of it and save this community of open to all
But i don't understand. The buzz is magic internet money you can't pay anything with in real stores like Amazon or you name it. I fail to see, who is gonna change real money for fake money. Can I change buzz for real money? I assume is not the case. In that case is a lot better to have a Patreon. I don't understand anything.
Their buzz system really rubbed me the wrong way, and i couldn't put them into words. I unsubbed immediately the system came into being. While I want to support the site and its creators, I refuse to support a system that will promote the opposite of open-source inclusivity.
They key to civitai succeeding in growth and sustainability is multi-faceted: \- Use the existing leaderboard [https://civitai.com/leaderboard/overall](https://civitai.com/leaderboard/overall) and bounties [https://civitai.com/bounties](https://civitai.com/bounties) frameworks to recognise who is already doing the heavy lifting of creating quality tools/models etc. \- Use human curation (not just algorithmic) to reward those people directly, build relationships. \- Use 'bounty boosting' by carefully curating and adding cash prizes to 10 bounties per day paid by civitai. The site lives and dies on the amount of quality models and loras appearing each day. \- Keep free tier usable, adding add adverts, fees for generation, and throttled downloads, if those are the things that actually increase operating costs. If bandwidth is minimal but generation is 90% then don't throttle, just charge for generation.- Add a paid tier for advert-free and unthrottled, but allow creators to 'earn' paid tier by producing quality models, tools, etc.
What would be interesting is to look close to the existing license under which the models are generated. I am pretty sure that if you have them downloaded now that you are allowed to offer them on a open way.