2w ago

Anyone else hear about this Canadian Facebook alternative

www.gandersocial.ca

301 Moved Permanently

I just found this when looking for Canadian alternatives. Anyone else hear about gander? I'm doing my best to support home grown and open alternatives but I have to choose what I am doing on the platform. It's unlikely that my older family will ever leave Facebook, but honestly, what do I miss by not being present there? Birthday posts on my wall and the latest vacation picture...

27 comments

Never heard of it. But what's in it for them? They're not gonna run this shit for free, we will still be the product.
- That's from their FAQ
  How is Gander financed?
  Right now we're a bootstrapped company, supported by our own time investment, and the early investment from friends and family. We expect to raise impact funding after our Beta launch, and to seek support from Government programs where possible.
  As for monetization, we're exploring a number of avenues including subscriptions for additional features, shared revenue models with creators, and ethical forms of advertising.
  
  I.e. a Canadian Facebook.
- Never heard of it
  Not surprised, they only announced it a couple of weeks ago.

I’m kind of all socialed out at this point—even being on Lemmy is a bit much some days, but if Gander can get its own version of Facebook’s Marketplace I’d be willing to have a gander myself.
EDIT: Hol up, it’s built on AT Protocol. I’m not sure if a marketplace would be possible the way it works now. sad goose noise*

Corporate for-profit social media? No thanks, I've seen this movie before. Get back to us when it's a non-profit or a coop.

Man, that's a pretty big management team for something that's just a bluesky front end.

I quasi-moved off of Facebook several years ago, mostly because I could not block the ads. Now because it is from the US. So I really have no need for a Canadian alternative to the book of faces. I have a blog if I want to scream into the void, and I am not going to be served ads doing this. I can post pictures I can write stuff about whatever, future employers wont have to do all their sneaky poop to check me out on Facebook and see what my friends are like. With my Canadian host I have unlimited emails so now everyone is getting their own email address to send me stuff, let it be person, business, or service I was trying to get close to having this done with Apple’s hide my email service but now that I have cancelled that service I have been given the opportunity to do it even better. Sense I found out my ISP uses exchange for their email service I have been trying to get that address empty, I know Microsoft aint looking through those emails but it is still a Microsoft service.
Plus have you ever seen wild geese? The are fucking anngry assholes.
- Hey, which Canadian host are you using? I'm in the market for one.
  
  I am fairly confident it is hosthero.ca. I have the know how to use a VPS, I just do not want to manage a VPS (well I would like to have fun and try maybe sometime just not now). I just need to find ways to get away from US service providers.
  On the topic of VPS I do not know if you want to count this or not but I use wireguard as a VPN into my home lab; which hosts my Jellyfin server, all my *arr apps, and my pihole. It does host a lot of space across my three pi’s with MVNe drives I have tried hosting my own Nextcloud but made a booboo and broke it so I went out and got a sync.com subscription for my cloud storage.
  Across all the services hosted by Apple, Wordpress, and whatever else I was paying for just cannot think of them now I am paying considerably less for my stuff.
  
  Not the person you asked, but I've had some luck with ovh. The web interface is a little jank, but it's super cheap for tiny a vps. Once you get ssh access it's like every other cloud provider. Not sure how their offerings for managed services is, since I run everything on vps (very small scale).
  Next up I'd really like to try self-hosting, and cut out the cloud entirely.

Get back to me when it federates with Friendica, but I'm 0% interested in this side of social media, personally.

Friendica seems like a better choice.

I would move to an alternative when people i know move from facebook
- That's where I'm at too. Most of my family is still on FB. But for actual engagement with the rest of the world, it is useless. That's why I'm here and ok bluesky. I'll probably hop on this platform to hold a spot and post there when I post on bluesky and Lemmy. See where I get the best conversation. Not about the number of comments. It's about the quality. Lots of good questions brought up here.

Nexopia?

27 comments