Olivier Simard-Casanova / is on Nostr

I'm a lot more active on Bluesky 🦋 @o.simardcasanova.net (link in bio).

French Economist & Writer, (soon) Research Associate at CEREFIGE/University of Lorraine, en 🇫🇷 and in 🇺🇸

Economics, Environment, Transit & Cities, Statistics & #Rstats, Critical Thinking, USA

🦋 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:esmiuxk53vmsllayghrq676w
🇺🇸 My Website: https://o.simardcasanova.net/linktree/
🇫🇷 Mon site Internet: https://olivier.simardcasanova.net/linktree/

Last Notes

2024-06-12 23:21:43

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I think this is the first time I’m having a constructive and genuinely interesting discussion on Mastodon about this subject. Thank you for that! I really appreciate it.
One of my worst experiences on social media happened on Mastodon, where I was harassed when I said I had a legitimate use case for quote posts. And then I received a strike by my former instance, on the grounds of "if you don’t like Mastodon, go back to Twitter".
I appreciate the change.

2024-06-12 23:17:03

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Same here. Bluesky has been very supportive of Bridgy. I don’t think AT Protocol can work with ActivityPub, as they are built on very different models. But bridges can already provide a lot of value. I’m following with a lot of interest the development of Bridgy.

2024-06-12 23:07:01

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AT Protocol also brings a fundamentally different model of moderation and algorithmic choice. Would all of this have been possible on ActivityPub? Maybe. But when? And how? Jay Graber has repeatedly said that one issue she had with AP wasn’t technical, but cultural. And considering the ultra-toxic backslash many projects got on Mastodon, she’s objectively right. Building AT Protocol allows to experiment in a completely different cultural space.

2024-06-12 23:04:30

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All of this has been extensively discussed already, I’m not sure I want to reopen this discussion.
AT Protocol is a completely different take on decentralization, which it tries to hide in the backend. ActivityPub is not intuitive, as you need to pick an instance, and search is not working well too as there’s no firehose. On Mastodon, like counts aren’t consistent from one server to another, and so on. These frictions add up.
Even Meta struggles to sell the Fediverse on Threads.

2024-06-12 21:32:42

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Imo, Bluesky is a vastly more fascinating project compared to the image it often has on Mastodon.
I genuinely get why people would be wary of Jack Dorsey. I rejoiced when he left the board, and when the whole Bluesky team annihilated him after he gave a really bad interview a few days later to some crypto bro or whatever.
Elon Musk is a bad CEO for Xitter, but Jack Dorsey was only marginally better.

2024-06-12 21:27:17

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You’re welcome.
In a nutshell, Jack Dorsey initiated Bluesky while he was Twitter’s CEO. At first, it was an internal project. But when Twitter hired Jay Graber to lead it, she spent six months advocating for Bluesky to be set as an autonomous entity. Which was approved, with a grant of 13 million USD paid by Twitter.
She designed the basic principles of AT Proto, and has run Bluesky ever since.
If she didn’t make it an independent entity, Bluesky would have been killed by Elon Musk.

2024-06-12 21:03:07

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To be clear, my criticism isn’t directed at you for sharing the video. I’m not even criticizing the author of the video. I have no reason to even suspect he had any intention to completely erase Jay Graber and her work.
My criticism is more systemic. Many media pushed the narrative of a "Jack Dorsey-run Bluesky" because it made a compelling story of tech billionaires fighting each other.
But in the case of Bluesky, it’s just not true.

2024-06-12 20:59:33

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The video is interesting, but sadly the parts about Bluesky are based on the usual misinformation about Jack Dorsey’s actual involvement in the platform.
He never ran it, he never had any operational role in it. Instead, from the beginning Bluesky has been led by Jay Graber, one of the very few women of power in the tech industry.
It’s increasingly tiresome to see people attributing the work of a talented women, here Jay Graber, to utterly mediocre men, here Jack Dorsey.

2024-05-21 10:13:11

The algorithm of #Threads is such a piece of garbage.
I’m slightly interested by the most recent #OpenAI disaster.
But almost all of my feed is made of people *I don’t follow* who post about it.
It’s awfully annoying, and it reduces the informational value of the app to basically zero.

2024-04-27 21:54:06

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Congrats! Everything that makes Mastodon and the Fediverse stronger is a welcome advancement.

2024-04-18 16:00:34

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I have seen this discourse from time to time on here: people being horribly condescending about "content creators".
What this condescending tone utterly fails to capture is that many of these "content creators" are independent workers trying to use social media to make a living.
Meta is not their employer. But they are extremely dependent on the decisions Meta takes. And the power relationship between creators and Meta is, by a wide margin, in favor of Meta.
2/6

2024-04-18 15:57:58

Okay #Mastodon, I think this one will resonate with many of you.
#Instagram has been recently criticised by many creators: they have a lot of followers, but very few of them actually see their posts.
Instagram's answer? "Stop crying".
Don't take my word for it, see for yourself here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C53oD86O8c0/
Considering #Threads is run by the same people, I'm increasingly convinced that #Meta will use Threads to exploit the free labor of creators in the same way it does with Instagram.
1/6
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/293/021/138/692/847/original/e0aaaecf3aeb3a11.jpeg