🇨🇦 How Canadians are fighting for digital independence

Gander's CEO on decentralization, crowdsourcing, and annexation fears

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What would it mean for Canadians to have their own social media platform? How important is it for any community to have a say over their own algorithms, have their data stored locally, and ensure that social media companies abide by their laws?

In this moment of national unity and pride, Canadians seem to think that’s all really important, and worth paying for. Gander is a wholly Canadian app that combines features familiar from apps like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. It is being built on the AT Protocol, the technology that powers Bluesky, as well as Blacksky and other new projects.

The Gander team wants to expand that infrastructure, building what they call a “sovereign social cloud” for all of Canada. If they get this right, it could signal the viability of an alternative, independent, decentralized social media app ecosystem.

And maybe most notably for a startup, Gander’s crowdfunding campaign has raised over $1.3 million CAD (nearly one million USD), and they are about to roll out their private beta to a waitlist of over 35,000. CEO & Product Director Ben Waldman tells me they expect to ramp up testing through the end of the year and open up invite codes in the first months of 2026. That timeline might shift, but the Gander team — about a dozen folks, with another dozen advisors, including our own Blaine Cook — is committed to transparently sharing updates throughout development.

Below, Ben shares why this kind of technological sovereignty matters so much to Canadians, what Bluesky’s technology offers them, and why they’re mainly focused on building a great app.

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Canadian flag image courtesy of Roman Yaroshchuk

Why this team is building Gander, and why they’re doing it right now:

So this started when you [the United States] had your last election and we got called the 51st state. There were very serious conversations about annexation happening in Canada, though they may have been taken lightly by some on both sides of the border.

I’d been involved online on the technology side of things. Annexation could really just look like an executive order that shuts down our entire cloud, or 95% of it. That was a very scary thought, and then at the same time, that whole period became unifying for Canada.

And so people started to talk about “buy Canadian” and stopped traveling to the US and all of these things started to happen, including something called “Elbows Up.” That’s a reference to Gordie Howe, but it was basically a defensive move in hockey. I got involved in Elbows Up, doing rallies across Canada, and we did the first one on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. And my contribution was really just, I’ll design a logo, I’ll take care of social media, I’ll shoot the events on video.

The first rally was a unifying, nonpartisan family-friendly event, and there were politicians speaking, comedians speaking, people from all walks of life. But the trolls descended on our feeds and politicized things very quickly. I just was like, how are we here?

And the idea for me was, I wonder if we could start a social media platform? I’d been on Bluesky and I knew it was open source, so I did a bit of digging, and within three days I had a proof of concept, very roughly filtering Bluesky’s feed for Canadian content. I could do it, and I’m not much of a developer. And I knew that if I got a team together, we could actually do this. And so that’s how Gander was born.

Why Canada needs its own independent social network:

Beyond the tech, there’s our cultural sovereignty. Canada, population-wise, is one-tenth the size of our neighbor. Our feeds are yours pretty much.

Canadian creators are largely being drowned out by their US counterparts on the platforms. We sort of feel like we’re at the whims of whatever an algorithm feeds to us. Sure, there’s some Canadian arts, culture, sports, and politics, but more often than not, it’s from the US.

In traditional media we still have “CanCon”, which are Canadian content laws. Our government really does not enforce our laws or our Charter of Rights on social media for the most part. So this is an opportunity for Canadians, with a decentralized system and moderation, to actually surface those voices and for people to, especially under a model like Bluesky’s, be able to control their feed.

This is not to be isolationist. I love baseball. There’s no way that I am going to get all the baseball news I want if it’s just Canadian content, it’s not going to happen. What we really want is for people in Canada, and ultimately internationally, to have control over their feeds.

How Canada regulated Big Tech, and Facebook abandoned Canadians:

It’s a little bit contentious. A few years ago our government put forward the Online News Act, wherein platforms would actually come to agreements with accredited news media and pay some amount of money in order to have news posts linked and shared via the platforms. I know that Google has come to some kind of agreement, but basically what Facebook said was, “Nah, we’re just going to block Canadian news.”

And so if you try and share a news link, it’s just blocked. There’s a lot of local, small towns, rural areas, small groups on Facebook, and that’s how they got their news. Now not only is that news gone, but what’s stepped into its place is fake news. People are posting their own opinions and lies, and foreign actors are manipulating through fake news stories and links to URLs that look very much like the real news.

It’s incredibly damaging, and frankly, frustrating and annoying. We’ve become accustomed to this. Please post news on Gander. We want real, accredited news on there. In fact, we’re having more and more conversations with accredited news media sources to ensure that we have that there.

What’s new and less familiar about Gander, compared to typical social media:

It may be a little bit less familiar to have control over your feed, like on Bluesky. We’re working on ways to help people not only refine their feed, but for the first release we have something called Nests.

We all like to go through a feed and discover things, but the reality is that those feeds get full very quickly of things, and there — I just missed that my sister-in-law just had her baby. The things that I want to follow closely should be my “for you page.” That’s my Nest. It’s not algorithm-controlled. It is human-controlled. I decide what goes in there.

And then a big focus for us is ensuring that the social component of social media is there, that you are connecting with friends and that you can have a place to be in groups and you can communicate with friends, or colleagues, or acquaintances, or creators, etc.

There will be built-in fact checking and bias-checking. We’re using an API for an existing platform. Anytime you post a news link, it’s checked through this database and it gives back the political leaning of the publisher and their factchecking record, according to this one organization, and we plan to expand on that as we go as well.

And because we’re a bilingual and multicultural country, very often when a user posts something in Canada, especially for businesses or public institutions, they need to publish posts in both English and French. I don’t know if this’ll be in the first release, but we’re looking at ways right now for users to not only select their language — English, French, whatever it is, including some indigenous languages — but switch between languages.

What Bluesky’s AT Protocol enables for Gander:

We are building a sovereign social cloud that we’re calling Wingspan. We have the opportunity right now, especially in this moment in Canada, to actually work and help provide Canadian public institutions, companies, nonprofits, and universities with their own PDS’s [where user data is stored] on the Gander network. That’s something that we’re really eager to do.

We’re so focused on just getting the app out at the moment, and we haven’t given it the love, the attention, and the money that it needs. However, that’s a big, big part of our next year, making sure that we can do that. We have the opportunity to go, “Hey, McGill University, we’ll give you your own McGill PDS, where you have governance control and students have control over all their own posts.”

We want to bring organizations online across the country to take part in Wingspan, while still taking part in the broader ATmosphere [the larger ecosystem of AT Protocol apps]. That means being able to still have posts out in Bluesky and everywhere else. We think that’s a really important part to this and that AT Proto is the best choice to support this.

Gander and moderation:

We’re riding this fine line as a for-profit, public benefit company, beholden to a mission that services the public. We want people to have control over these things. The idea that we would be the arbiters of every moderation decision would be more of a risk to us and to users in the long run.

Instead, we will have an open labeling system on top of a baseline of Canadian law. External organizations and third party label companies will also be labeling content, and users can subscribe to those additional labels, assuming that they fall under Canadian law.

This is new territory for us. We’ll have to keep refining. But I think that’s what this is about, refining for the better over the long term, while still ensuring that we’re protecting people at a very basic level and that people have control and consent to be able to do and say what they want.

Why Gander is crowdfunding:

We did speak to venture capital type folks and angel investors at the outset. It was like very early “Elbows Up” Canada time, and we thought, who isn’t going to want to fund this? Let me tell you, if it doesn’t include “AI,” then nobody is interested in funding it.

At the same time we had a lot of conversations with different departments in the Canadian government, knowing that we didn’t want to be perceived as a Canadian government-funded social media platform, because that would come with all sorts of politics as well. But there are a number of programs that accept early-stage businesses. We got a lot of well-wishes and a lot of, “can’t wait to join it.”

We can’t get VCs to do the right thing. We can’t get government to do the right thing. But Canadians want this. If we would have had to give up equity to a VC, why not give equity to Canadians and have them own this? That’s what we’ve been doing with the crowdfunding campaign. There’s more accountability to Canadians and we’re so happy that we took that path. It’s been exciting and wonderful, and at times frustrating and a lot of work. Doing it this way has given us at least a year of runway.

Gander’s long-term plans for sustainability:

In all our research with our early access program folks, and our research externally, it’s come back that people would rather pay for social media than they would have their data used and be manipulated. Gander will remain free for most users, but we’re working on subscription features.

If you want to be able to toggle between multiple accounts, or have a professional account, you’ve got to subscribe. Maybe you want anonymized analytics because you’re a creator or a small business, or you want to have multiple seats on one account. These examples are not written in stone by any means. They’re just things that we’re thinking about. Otherwise, come on and use it for free.

From day one, even before we got feedback, we said we’re not doing the same feed advertising thing that other platforms are doing. It’s just too hard to put the saddle on a running horse. We are looking at more ethical approaches to advertising, where as a user you might opt in to see ads from a particular brand. If you’re a fan of a Canadian band, then maybe you can opt-in to see when they have an album coming out or are touring. We’re also looking at branded experiences on the platform, where particular features might be sponsored by a brand for a period of time, that kind of thing.

We may be able to provide access to Wingspan as an enterprise service to public interest organizations, and businesses. So those are the main ways right now that we’re looking at monetizing. We’re happy to be a small business that does a good job.

What success will look like for Gander:

The answer that you would probably expect is like, we’ve got one million users in our first year or whatever. Obviously that’s important to us. Honestly, it’s Wingspan getting adopted, the sovereign social cloud. Because the more people who participate in the ATmosphere, or Mastodon’s ActivityPub, or in any of these open, people-owned protocols, the more control that we’re taking back. That means that if the lights are shut, they’re not shut entirely. We still have a means of communicating with one another. That to me would be a big success.

But we realized that just copying Bluesky on our own server is not going to help the millions of people that are still on Facebook or who love Instagram. Let me tell you: they don’t know, nor do they care, about an “ATmosphere.” They just want a great experience on an app.

That’s the message that we’re primarily sending out there: my mom and my son can get on there. So I think success is people getting on the platform and enjoying the platform.

Thanks Ben!

Thinking my home, Washington D.C., makes a lot more sense being the 51st state,

–Josh