What is Gander Social?
Gander Social is a new social platform being built by a Canadian team that wants to make online interaction safer and more meaningful. The focus is on privacy, transparency, and real engagement instead of clicks and outrage.
The whole project just seems kinda pointless to me as a fedizen. Canadian fediverse instances already exceed the vision of gander. The only principle differentiating this thing from the rest of corporate social media is the maple-flavoured nationalism.
I suppose it’s good that they dodged a couple of VC bullets, but, like, why do they need that much funding to spin up a fork of bluesky, y’know?
I find all new social media that’s built to escape Twitter, Meta etc to be pointless unless it’s Fedi. It’ll all turn to shit (see BlueSky etc) like the others did. I mean as soon as algorithm meets money making (ads) it’s over. Let alone when somebody owns it who is a fascist or(and) tech bro/billionaire. Repeating the same thing won’t make a difference.
My problem with their whole funding model was that rich people with lots of money would get to be on an advisory role. Fuck that shit. You’re already doing it wrong.
The valuation from the public raise seemed wildly high imo for something pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-user, and without any unique IP. Seems like basically they got caught in being overvalued at their crowd funding seed stage and put themselves in a jam where they either had the equivalent of a down round to bring in the advisors they wanted or to part ways with them in what was ultimately going to be a public situation because they’re overvalued for the stage they’re at and got ahead of themselves with communicating about the advisory relationship.
I don’t see much that’s really damning though. It’s maybe just getting out too far over your skis from lack of experience. Some of the comments are a bit rough in the article, but I wouldn’t write them off from that.
