VIDEO. “A big disappointment”: at 62, Roger has just lost 15 years of Skyblog on racing pigeons

2023-08-23 22:06:18

“We had found a way to communicate that suited us very well. It’s not because we’re a little older that we can’t use a tool that is functional”, confides Roger Tantart. This 62-year-old Northerner is the creator of the Skyblog “Colombier TANTART”, dedicated to pigeon racing, the breeding of racing pigeons for flight competitions all over France.

This small community of around 10,000 followers was one of the last to use Skyblogs daily in 2023, a far cry from the first young, connected users of the platform at the dawn of the 2000s. Now, these users will have to migrate to a another social network, since the Skyblogs definitively died out at the beginning of the week.

“It’s a big disappointment,” slips Roger Tantart. His own Skyblog will disappear in the next few hours, like 19 million others, survivors of the more than 29 million that have flourished during the 21 years of existence of this popular platform. On a daily basis, the father of the family related the wanderings of his birds, compiled their results, chronicled births, disappearances and some family events. Roger’s more than 200 pages had been viewed 1.8 million times in the blog’s more than 15 years of existence.

In June, Pierre Bellanger, founder and president of the Skyrock group, and his deputy managing director Jérôme Aguesse, announced that they were cutting the screens definitively: “To bring us into compliance with the legislation on personal data, to keep the platform and the skyblogs in their candid and rash presentation, we need to freeze it and remove it from public access”.

“Colombier TANTART”, like the other Skyblogs now offline, will now live a second life in the archives of the BnF and the INA, as a precious testimony to the favorite digital practices of the French during the first two decades of the third millennium. .