So can you tell us a little bit about how that's all gone?

Yeah.

So the, the idea with Gander, part of creating a better social network, and when we say better, we mean, you know, we're, we're all tired of the outrage and the manipulation and the al- you know, algorithms, the surfacing toxicity and the bots and the, or, or, or, or, or at least we're tired of it on our team, [chuckles] and, uh, we know a lot of others are.

Um, it's, it's sort of what has really turned social media into, you know, uh, shit, [chuckles] um, and, and something that we tolerate more than really enjoy for the most part.

And so our goal from the get-go was to solve some of those problems.

How do you solve, uh, you know, misinformation? How do you solve, uh, pe- you know, the outrage? How do you solve trolling? How do...

That kind of thing.

[laughs]

So what is Gander? How does it work?

Uh, so Gander is a, it's a social network for real people, like real connections.

We've designed this for adult humans.

It's away from the outrage, the like counts, and the manipulation.

And we built it really in response to places like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok that promised us all community and discovery and connection and are no longer delivering that.

So, uh, we designed something that it's away from algorithms that favor all the outrage and the misinformation and the bots and the trolls and the bullying and even foreign interference, and then of course now AI.

Um, all of that, that has been done at the expense of people, adults, kids included.

How are you doing that? And, and is that successful?

But I guess just that at a first step kind of high level question, just how hard is it to create a Canadian sovereign social network?

So I've never done this before.

It's the first for me of any social network.

And so it's absolutely, I mean, we all know social media from the outside, right? The mechanics of what happens behind it, you know, moderation, which I'm sure we'll talk about, but like the technology side, adding the layer of sovereignty to that, like data sovereignty, as opposed to say like cultural sovereignty, um is is It's not easy.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they've built things so that at a press of a button, you can spin up a server, a cloud instance, more or less.

And there are plenty of DevOps people out there and technology people who know how to do this stuff.

To do it in a sovereign way on open source technology is a little more specialized.

yeah okay so that's the that's the data side there's an identity side here that's quite interesting i think with gander as well can you can you walk through what a user has to do in order to post on the service i know there's real verification requirements uh can you describe what those are and and what kind of effect are you seeing in terms of some of the friction that that might create

But I think the first question I had, a question that a lot of listeners are having this morning is like, why do I need another social media app? So tell us why Gander's different.

Well, so we started this just about a year ago now.

Basically, you know, just around a year ago, we were called the 51st state by our neighbors down south.

And that had come on the heels of the US elections.

And I don't know if you've noticed or not, but social media isn't exactly the nicest place to be right now.

And it's been about a decade of increasing division and algorithms that are there to manipulate you.

And, you know, it's just become so toxic.

guys are Canadian? So you're not affected by the whole issues with Facebook and Meta and the Canadian government and paying for content?