Gander: Canada’s social network takes flight this fall

As Ben Waldman, Founder and CEO of Gander Social, watched the second inauguration of US President Donald Trump, he couldn't help notice a group of tech executives gather behind the president while he took the oath of office. As Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok's Shou Zi Chew stood behind America's leader, who has taunted Canada with threats of annexation, Waldman recognised that unity is growing increasingly important to Canada.

He joined Elbows Up, a non-partisan group supporting Canadian sovereignty, shortly after. At the organisation, he managed a social media account, promoting rallies on Capitol Hill. At one event, he found numerous individuals spreading misinformation and disinformation in the comment section of Elbows Up social accounts. 

Waldman says this influenced him to start work on a Canadian social media platform developed by Canadians, run by Canadians, with data stored domestically.

Gander Social is what Waldman describes as a slow-growth, sustainable social media platform that is, and will stay, sovereign. "We're not looking for rapid growth to take over the world of social media. We're looking for something that's sustainable, that we can do that's not going to be extractive."

Similar to BlueSky, Gander is built on the open-source AT Protocol standard. This enabled Waldman and his team to streamline a proof of concept earlier this year. 

Gander and BlueSky will run parallel to each other. Currently, Waldman's team is working on automating the integration with Bluesky.

"Normally, it would be a chicken and egg situation where there's no content and so you can't get users. And then how do you get users if there's no content? But we don't expect that we'll have that problem out of the gate," says Waldman

With text-based posts similar to those on Twitter and the potential for video content similar to formats seen on TikTok, Gander's open-source framework holds significant potential. Waldman aims to reinvent elements from existing social media platforms, avoiding reliance on algorithms and data targeting.

"We're taking back the 'For You' page so it's the user under the user's control," says Waldman. "Say I don't want to miss the content from my mom, a hockey player or my new favourite newspaper - you get to put what that looks like together on your 'For You' page." At Gander, they call that the 'nest.'

Waldman says an unfortunate byproduct of Gander's Canadian sovereignty messaging is the perception that Gander is exclusive to Canadians. This won't always be true. Gander will eventually open up to an international audience. Still, Waldman says that focusing on local users will help the platform establish a reputation as an ethical business that effectively verifies users.

"Our main goal here is to make sure that Canadians join a social media platform that is more ethical values based and isn't there just to steal their data."

Gander's platform emphasises localised data stored in Canadian data centres, vital storage space that is becoming increasingly scarce as generative AI companies acquire centralised data.

"I didn't even know that the sovereign thing was possible at first," admits Waldman. 

The company explored purchasing rack space for its data storage while offering open-source cloud solutions to users from a Canadian location. However, Waldman says that Gander is not at the stage to manage that kind of service. 

Instead, Gander partnered with Toronto-based cloud service provider ThinkOn, a channel-only cloud provider offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions.

As the platform evolves, Gander hopes to install additional servers nationwide.

The business model? Well, so far, funding has been bootstrapped with dollars flowing from family, friends, and some team members. This financing method will support operations until the beta release is completed. From there, Waldman says Gander will continue to fundraise and aspire for grants and some private partnerships.

Advertising is not off the table, but it would be subject to greater scrutiny than the industry standard, including opt-in options for certain advertising and the frequency of ads. Waldman says the focus, for now, is to get the platform out to Canadians.

Two weeks after Gander was announced to the world, the platform stood at 6,000 early access registrations. Three weeks ago, this number jumped to 30,000. 

Gander expects to see half a million users within the first year of operation.

The platform has attracted significant advisors, including Arlene Dickinson of District Venture and Peter Wall of Elbow's Up. Blane Cook, a former engineer at Twitter, has also joined the team.

With discussions of expanding development to long-form posts and news organisation partnerships, additional content phases can be expected in the future.

Within the upcoming months, family and friends fundraising will close as username selection for pre-registered users will begin. The public beta phase is scheduled to start in Q4 of this year.