Gander CEO Ben Waldman explains his vision for sovereign social media.
In 2025, the year of our meme lord, social media sucks.
And on social networks there is sucks for a whileBut this year the situation has changed: Meta's Mark Zuckerberg believes that the solution to the problem of loneliness that his company helped create is this. AI friendsboth Meta and OpenAI have launched applications primarily for Video created by artificial intelligence.
“It's one thing to say, 'Let's do this in a sovereign way.' It’s another thing to actually do it.”
Ben Waldman
Gander Social
But what if there was a better way? Perhaps more Canadian way?
Gander Social is trying to do what seemed unthinkable six months ago: build a Canadian social network.
The idea itself raises many interesting questions. What do sovereign social networks look like? How Canadian would that be? What will stop Gander from moving to any other social network?
On this week's episode of the BetaKit podcast, I ask these questions to Gander CEO Ben Waldman and many others. With the app gearing up to launch a closed beta test later this month, along with a crowdfunding campaign via Frontfondr— it was very interesting to find out which questions Wallman has answers to and which ones he doesn’t.
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However, one area that Waldman was able to talk about in detail was identity verification. Gander intends to deal with this complex topic in the most Canadian way possible, using core technologies created by Interac and Canada Post. It's a solution that could help win over the fledgling social network among its core user base.
But will the Canadian flag help Gander get his bearings? cold start problem all social networks collide at startup, or enchitification problem all technical people after successful scaling?
Let's dig in.
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Peculiarity Image courtesy of Gander Social. Recorded and edited on Toronto Podcasts.
