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A Canadian Social Network? Don’t Roll Your Eyes Yet

Gander is betting there’s an appetite for a homegrown platform built on trust instead of outrage

Ben Waldman calls it the “goose chase”: a friendly peer-pressure campaign to coax celebrities, public figures, and cultural organizations onto Gander, the Canadian-made social media that the chief executive officer and his co-founders dreamed up over a year ago. The real goose chase, however, might be the project itself—an audacious, if quixotic, attempt to create a homegrown network to preserve some measure of sovereignty over our online conversations. Can it actually work?

I reached Waldman by Zoom to talk about what he’s trying to build and why. He had just completed a small media blitz following Gander’s launch on Canada Day.

If I joined the 28,000 people already on Gander, what could I actually do?

You can post text—currently up to 300 characters—along with images, galleries, and video. We follow many of the same conventions as Bluesky. We have what we call Flicks, which are similar to short-form vertical videos. The idea is that you can scroll through them—but hopefully not doomscroll. We also have a feature called Boards, which is still in its early stages. It lets you save things you want to come back to or share later—a recipe, an article, whatever it might be. Eventually we’d like people to be able to save content from outside Gander as well.

You’ve described Gander as Canadian, so I’m curious what that actually means. Is it simply where the company is headquartered? What does it mean to be a Canadian social platform?

It’s built in Canada, first of all. It’s Canadian owned, and we’re structured as a benefit company.

As I understand it, that means you have a legal obligation to pursue public-benefit goals alongside profit?

Exactly. Public benefit and profit. Part of our public-benefit commitment is that we’ll always be Canadian owned. We’re creating jobs in Canada. Our development team and all our staff are here. Our hosting is on sovereign Canadian infrastructure—not just the servers but the cloud itself. It’s open-source infrastructure that’s not subject to the United States Patriot Act or the Cloud Act. We’re not using Amazon, Google, or Microsoft cloud services. Everything is governed exclusively by Canadian law.

The platform itself runs on an open social network—the same underlying system Bluesky uses. We’ve built a Canadian implementation with the idea that organizations across the country could eventually operate their own servers while maintaining ownership and control of their own data. A university could do it. A First Nation could do it. The Walrus could do it. The idea is that everyone keeps control of their own data.

What kicked off the idea?

The catalyst was when US president Donald Trump started talking about Canada becoming the fifty-first state. At the time, a lot of us were genuinely worried. One thing became clear in conversations I was having: roughly 90 percent of our data infrastructure is controlled by American companies. With the stroke of a pen, all that could be disrupted.

So the idea of creating a Canadian social platform—which is really civic infrastructure in a modern democracy—became incredibly compelling. That said, we’re interoperable. We connect to Bluesky, and there are other similar emerging networks in Europe. That means users on one network can connect with users on another, and even shuttle their identity, content, and followers between services. The goal isn’t to create something “rah-rah” Canadian. It’s to give people a space governed by Canadian laws while remaining connected to the broader open social web.

One of those public-benefit goals is healthier conversation and stronger democratic participation. How do you actually create healthier conversations? What are you doing differently from platforms that have become polarized or toxic?

One important difference is that everyone who posts, comments, or chats has to verify that they’re human. Right now, there are two ways to do that. You can verify through an institutional email address—a university, professional association, union, and so on—or through Canada Post’s Identity app, which verifies that you’re an adult without sharing your personal information with us.

We don’t receive your identity data. All we receive is confirmation that you’re a real adult. We don’t want people’s personal information because we don’t want to become a target for cyberattacks or data breaches. Canada Post deletes the verification information shortly after it’s processed. For a company our size, this is the best way we’ve found to reduce bots, trolls, and fake accounts without trying to fight AI with AI.

And the second piece?

The second piece is moderation. Instead........

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