I have been taking a break from some of the other socials.
Ok, ok, not entirely. I am not a monk on a mountain, and apparently my job, writing, and general inability to ignore the dumpster fire South of us make a full retreat unrealistic. But I have spent less time marinating in the endless churn of flags, AI images, rage bait, and people performing for an algorithm that could not care less about us and whether we as Canadians have a voice.
And so I have spent more time on Gander.
Gander is not perfect. No social network is. Give any collection of human beings enough time and somebody will start an argument, somebody else will misread it, and a third person will arrive with a graph made in 2007. We are a species with hobbies, interests, and deeply held opinions about a lot of things.
Still, the general feed feels different on Gander. Doesn't it?
There are people talking about actual things. A long story about a stranger helping a broke young tree planter get home. Posts about Gander, Newfoundland, and the people who opened their doors to stranded travellers after 9/11 (check out #GoodFromGander.) A founder talking directly with users about what is working and what has gone sideways.
Ben Waldman even sat down with Marta Summers (martasummers.gander.social / @martasummers.bsky.social ) and Bailey Colors (baileycolors.gander.social / @becolourofficial.bsky.social ) for a conversation about Gander. Not a glossy “we are excited to announce” video, thankfully. Just a real conversation about what they are building.
Then there was a comment outage while the production servers were being updated for a new app version (the 900 character update.) Jeff Wood posted that a small bug had slipped in. That was it. No smoke bomb. No “we are aware of an issue affecting a subset of users” nonsense. The comments broke. They were fixing it (Nico in the comments made me spit my coffee out - thanks - "The most savage of bugs - the no see um".)
I know. I know. It's not exactly the moon landing but having someone just say, hey, we f'd up. Sorry.
We've spent years being trained to accept that social media should leave us angry, anxious, and intermittently convinced that civilisation is held together by duct tape. The platforms call it engagement. The advertisers call it reach. I don't know what to call it. Exhaustion. Burn out. Some of the crap I'd say exasperated.
Taking a break from that has been useful. It has also reminded me that digital sovereignty is about more than where the servers sit.
The infrastructure still matters. Canadian data, Canadian companies, Canadian law, Canadian capacity. I have written about that before, a few times. If every important part of our digital life is owned, operated, and governed somewhere else, our choices get pretty thin. We are basically choosing which foreign giant gets to change the rules on us next. I think we've all had an account closed without warning.
Most of us do not think about that until it is already happening.
But sovereignty is cultural too. It is having places where we get some say in the norms. Where every conversation is not bent around an algorithm that has learned outrage is easier to sell than compassion or just a normal, civil, disagreement.
And yeah, we have Chapman’s.
No, ice cream is not the foundation of national sovereignty (Champman's may disagree). That would be a hell of a burden to put on a tub of Maple Walnut Premium Ice Cream. But seeing a Canadian family-owned company from Markdale, Ontario, on a Canadian social platform is still a nice little thing.
It doesn't need to be grand. Canadian does not always have to arrive wrapped in a flag, a Heritage Minute, and a speech about lumber. Sometimes it is ice cream. Sometimes it is somebody telling a story. Sometimes it is a place online that does not immediately make you regret having electricity or internet access.
Gander’s new 900-character limit is part of that for me.
It's not revolutionary. It is more room. I wanted more room, I was hoping for a messily 400 characters, and now I have 900 to figure out what to do with it. That feels beyond fair... edit? :-).
But it also gives people room to tell the whole story. To add context. To be human for a few more sentences before the platform nudges them toward whatever is next. And people are using it.
The other part is that Gander is not trying to lock Canadians in a digital snow globe. It's built on the AT Protocol: portable identity, interoperable services, and the possibility of moving between applications without throwing your entire online life in the bin. It doesn't magically fix moderation, harassment, misinformation, or the human tendency to say dumb things before coffee. Nothing does.
But it's a better direction than handing everything over to one company and hoping it stays decent forever. If you are interested here's the AT Protocol overview
I don't think Canada needs a sealed-off national internet (but we do need to mitigate the use of U.S. routing, more on that in another post). And we do need more choices. More Canadian capacity. More room to build spaces that feel like ours, while staying connected to the larger world. We should be able to leave a platform when it becomes unbearable without losing our identity, our connections, and years of work because some company in California changed its priorities.
Gander will have hard conversations. It should. A platform can't survive on only weather reports, geese, and Chapman’s updates. But we are growing conversations, growing content, growing communities. 48,000 of us are here building. Canada needs to get behind it's local platforms and for sure we need the government to focus more on this side of sovereignty than on AI data centres (Ben I'm with you there on that).
Hard conversations don't need to become a blood sport every bloody time. We can disagree without turning every issue into a tribal loyalty test. We can care about Canadian sovereignty without pretending the rest of the world does not exist. We can build something local without closing the door behind us.
I don't know whether Gander becomes a lasting part of Canada’s social-media landscape, I hope it does, it's building the actual infrastructure that's needed (that's the unsexy nerdy part I write about.) But that too is still being written.
I do know that taking a break from the other places has made me appreciate what it feels like when a feed does not seem designed to make me miserable.
Come follow me on Gander Social were we jgbutterfieldwrites.gander.social we can chit chat about sovereigty and just be
On the whole a decent online space, responsive to issues. The “bias-fact check” is done through a U.S. firm with a similar grip on reality of the political administration. Fortunately this can be disabled.
Agree, and I think they are looking at other options. Hopefully something else comes up and is cost effective, that does not rely on a US service.