Canadians are searching for a way to interact more primarily with each other online

They are not the only ones.

If you are Canadian you may have seen this message recently:

Attention is a zero sum game and Canadians are starting in greater numbers to ask reasonable questions about why their limited attention should be taken up by people who live in another country and who are, even when they are not being actively hostile towards them, not really much like them in any way at all.

Given recent events in the relationship between Canada and the United States, its not surprising to think that maybe some Canadians might be tired of living in a US-hosted and US-controlled social media house which emphasizes messages based on prevailing US politics and events at the expense of any others.

This will probably come as surprising news to many Americans, especially the ones the Canadians probably most want to get away from, but it shouldn't. Even in America there are people who ask similar questions, for similar reasons, and it turns out, are implementing technically very similar answers.

A great Primer on this is https://www.wired.com/story/blacksky-is-nothing-like-black-twitter/. A quick summary is that even in the heyday of Twitter, when many diverse communities co-existed more or less peacefully on that global platform, some people not from their communities who are invested in racism and homophobia and other harmful beliefs caused constant problems that many people felt were too often swept under the rug.

Later, when some of those communities migrated to Bluesky, for reasons, there was a perception that the moats erected by the Bluesky community against these and other negatives were still not tall enough. The positive difference is that the Bluesky platform is founded on the AT Protocol, an open and modular set of microservices which can be used to implement bespoke standards-based social media services. Blacksky was developed on this platform specifically to provide moderation (and other) services to members of the black community who were seeking a greater level of online safety and community support than the default Bluesky tools and processes could provide.

In Canada the issue goes beyond moderation and pure personal online safety. Historically there have been persistent concerns that Canadian voices and stories would be drowned out in their own country by a flood of content from foreign suppliers: since the 1950s there have been Canadian Government departments and regulations mandated to try to address this concern and lift Canadian voices so they could be more easily heard. These regulations have had differing success over the decades in different content verticals, with the common outcome that the seemingly uncontrollable access afforded by online technologies have rendered many of the programs associated with these regulations quite moot.

Now the Canadian public, long indifferent or even hostile to these Canadian content efforts, may be forming a new sentiment. Much of the content available to them on English-speaking social media is culturally American, and contains the same racist, homophobic, and violent material which many Americans have sought shelter from, to say nothing of constant depictions of rising political violence, bloody school shootings, and the current political thrust to take away health insurance from millions of Americans. All of this is extremely foreign to Canadians, a society which identifies itself with core values of safe communities and universal healthcare, and exposure to it on a constant basis is more and more being considered extremely undesirable.

It will be a great challenge to enable, within the AT protocol or on any other platform, a method which ordinary people can use to easily and accurately filter all of this from their feed, leaving primarily Canadian voices reflecting Canadian values to interact with. What is interesting is that the impetus to achieve this capability is coming up from the bottom this time, from ordinary Canadians, and not down from the Government or special interests, who have recently and quite vigorously argued this sort of thing is technically impossible and economically undesirable. To be clear, the current objectives on the Gander website are neither of these things, and any effort made to put them in place will contribute not only to the well-being of Canadians, but as well for people in countries all over the world who find themselves in the same or a similar situation.

People living in America, included.