So I'll open up here with uh Jennifer Mitchell from Gander Social. Thank you. It was a good reminder to introduce myself. I am Jennifer Mitchell from Gander Social. Thank you. So Gander Social, why do we even exist? Because who wants another social media network? So hey, we've got one one person does, so that's good for us. Nice. So over the last few years, Canadians have started noticing something like a little fishy. And almost every place where we talk online is owned somewhere else. And that somewhere else is the United States, mostly. Which worked fine, or at least we pretended it worked fine for a while.
But when that country starts talking about annexation and turning us into the 51st state, it suddenly feels a little bit strange that all of our national conversations happen on their infrastructure and what a risk that would be to us if they did suddenly you know take their own threats seriously, which we certainly do. So that realization led our founder Ben Wallman, he's over there, you can talk to him either. Um to ask a simple question: what would it look like if Canadians had a social network that was truly ours? So not isolationist, but just digital sovereignty and choice, and that idea became gander social.
So when we started researching how to build this kind of sovereign social space, we realized something very quickly. If we were going to build a closed platform, we would recreate the exact problems that we were trying to solve. And so then Ben discovered the app protocol. So we're an interesting thing is that for us the problem came first, and app protocol came second, which is kind of a different story, I think to a lot of the other companies building on the protocol today. But what really excited us about the protocol was three things. So one was user portability.
So we very firmly wanted the users to have control over their own data. We don't want their data. If we could know nothing about them, that would be the preference because then now we're a low-risk target and now there's no risk that we're ever going to sell it on to any person or company in the future. So user portability was a massive one for us. The second one was of course the interoperability. Um, you know, if you're building any kind of new social network, the empty room is a big issue, and so having that interoperability into an existing data layer would be incredibly helpful, but also recognizing what the future potential of that was going to be for us.
And then third, which is uh even more interesting for us because we have equal amount of supporters and attractors for how we're doing this is permissionless innovation. Um so the fact that we can build what we want on the protocol without having to go and ask for permission is actually quite a big deal. And it really kind of pushes forward what we could potentially do. So we didn't really see the protocol as just infrastructure, we saw it as alignment with our values. So we solve that, then we have to figure out what our users actually want.
And the thing is is like the people using Gander today fall into two groups. So right now we're in a closed beta. We ideally would have been out of that beta by this conference, but Apple liked to wait to give you know approval on your production app, and so we wait. But we've got about probably 9,000 people in a closed beta and about 30,000 people knocking down the doors to try and get in. And they fall into two groups. So we have one group who have heard of Bluesky, maybe they're on Bluesky, and they understand the Atmosphere ecosystem.
And then the other group have haven't heard of either, and nor do they care. And uh the majority of the people on there are in that second group. And so what they want is actually deceptively simple, deceptively simple. They want to meaningfully connect with other humans. They want accessible, familiar features that are easy to use, and they want to reach their audiences, whether they're creators or businesses or whoever that is, and they want somewhere that they can trust again and somewhere that feels safe and civil. So our focus at Gander is actually delivering those familiar features, hopefully with a pro-social twist that we continue to experiment with on actual sovereign infrastructure, but we still benefit from the interoperability of the protocol underneath that.
And so no, we're not going anywhere. Well, we went too far. Great. So the promise of the app protocol is interoperability. Um, but when we were discussing this user choice, this user agency, all of these things we wanted to give people, we realized that we can't force interoperability onto people as individuals. And so who decides how interoperable you are as an individual? And our answer always comes back to the user has to decide. And so on Gander users will be able to choose their level of participation in the wider Atmosphere. So for example, if a user wants to post only a small group, what we're currently calling nests, because you know, gander geese, the puns are endless.
Or they want to post just inside Gander, or they want to post to the entire Atmosphere, they can choose to do that. And the same applies to what they see. So if they want to view a private social circle, they want to view Gander-only content, or they want to again view and have access to the entire Atmosphere, they choose that. So on screen is just an example of someone's settings where they're choosing to view Gander in their feeds and also Bluesky in their feeds. And the intention is to open that up to everybody who's participating in the Atmosphere so the users can toggle on and off what content they want to receive.
Because some of our users really, really, really love the open Atmosphere, and other users want a quieter space where they're just focused on friends and family, and both of those choices are valid, and we're not going to make that choice for them. So our philosophy is very very simple, which is interoperability by choice. So one of the biggest challenges social media faces today is a collapse of trust. So of course we were like, well, let's make it sovereign, but like let's also make it better. What an opportunity to take. And so at the moment, you know, we've got bots, we've got coordinated manipulation, we've got disinformation, we've got harassment, and many networks try to fix these problems after the fact.
And we wanted to design systems that help prevent them in the first place. So we think about Gander as an experiment in pro social design. Several systems working together. So first we have our human verification, which we are planning to do through Canada Post Identity Verification Service, and in a nutshell, the verification happens entirely on device with Canada Post verification system, including being able to walk into your local post office and verify that you're a human being. We never receive identity documents, nor do we want them, quite frankly. We just receive a signal confirming someone is human and someone is over 18.
And so someone is already on the beta, it's not like that now, but very shortly, if you want to engage on on Gander, so you want to post, comment, etc., you are going to have to verify that you're a human being and over 18, otherwise you get a view-only access to it. And that small amount of friction that we are deliberately introducing is going to help us discourage bots and coordinated abuse. So our second then is moderation infrastructure. We're running our own instance of ozone and we have our own moderation policies that are in line with Canadian law and the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which is incredibly important here.
We have freedom of expression, we don't have free speech. That distinction is important and it makes it a safer space to be. And also information integrity. So we integrate media bias indicators and source factuality signals, giving users more context when they encounter information. So what have we built so far? Little snapshots all over. I'll give you a list. I'll let it read it out. We have text posts, we have images, we have vertical video scrolling, like on TikTok, we have boards like Pinterest, we have feeds, we have direct messages. We also support multiple feeds, allowing different ways to experience content.
Like I said, we've already deployed our own ozone moderation instance, the media bias and fact-checking integrations, and we're preparing to test the human verification very shortly. We have 8,000, almost 9,000 beta testers now, 30,000 people waiting to get in, and once all of those folks are in, everybody gets invite codes to invite their friends and family. We are deliberately not doing a big splashy launch because we want this to come out sustainably and thoughtfully. So what does it feel like on Gander right now? This this is this has been a big one for us. So it turns out when you change the structure of a social network, you can actually fundamentally change the culture of the conversation.
And people are really noticing that Gander is different. It's a little slower, it's a little more human, all our feeds are chronological, and it feels a little bit more like the early days of social media. And that is something that we are going to try to continue to, you know, hopefully it will persist as we get bigger. So while we've built the features and the infrastructure, we're also starting to see something else emerge. So a community culture that is more civil and more intentional. I'm running out of time, so I might skip the next bit. Basically, for a long time, social media has been something we were given.
So platforms told us what it would be, algorithms told us what we would see, and we think the next phase should look very different. And networks where users have real choice, where we can build communities, ecosystems where developers build together, and Gander is just one experiment in that future, and hopefully one that will persist. And we're excited to build it in the Atmosphere. Thank you.