The Infrastructure of Our Discontent
Act I: When They Own the Conversation
The Day Facebook Killed a Newspaper
Theresa Blackburn built the River Valley Sun from nothing. Since 2019, she's covered New Brunswick's Western Valley—every council meeting, every graduation, every story that mattered to 35,000 rural residents.
On August 1, 2023, Meta flipped a switch.
"[Facebook] allowed us to disseminate information, to have a platform for no real cost and to get everything out there," Blackburn told CBC News in August 2023. Before Meta's news ban, River Valley Sun stories generated between 400,000 and 500,000 monthly engagements on Facebook. After creating a website post-ban, they now get just 40,000 monthly visits[^1].
A 90% drop overnight.
"We're losing, and that means the community is losing," Blackburn said in November 2023. "At some point in time someone isn't going to get the information they need to be safe."
In Regina, the absurdity peaked. Just Bins Waste Disposal—yes, a garbage company—was voted the city's "best online news source" in the Best of Regina awards. Because it's not a news organization, Meta doesn't block it. The company now reports on everything from traffic accidents to City Hall scandals, beating traditional media to stories while lacking any journalistic standards[^2].
Actual garbage. Filling the news vacuum.
This is what digital dependency looks like: A foreign corporation deciding, unilaterally, what 21 million Canadians can read, share, and discuss. Not through censorship or propaganda, but through the simple exercise of monopolistic power.
They own the infrastructure. They make the rules. We live with the consequences.
We didn't choose these constraints. But we might be able to choose the next ones.
The Sovereignty Emergency
Canada is bleeding talent and sovereignty through every ethernet cable that crosses our border.
Start with the brain drain. Two-thirds of Canadian software engineering graduates flee to the United States, according to a Globe and Mail analysis of LinkedIn profiles. The driver is money: Canadian tech workers face a 46% salary gap compared to their US counterparts. A Toronto engineer averages $106,000. Their San Francisco equivalent? $260,000[^3].
But the talent theft pales beside the sovereignty theft.
In February 2025, Elon Musk—who holds Canadian citizenship through his Regina-born mother and attended Queen's University—posted "Canada is not a real country" on X in response to a growing petition to revoke his citizenship. Though he deleted the tweet, screenshots had already circulated widely across Canadian social media.
The petition, started by Nanaimo author Qualia Reed and sponsored by NDP MP Charlie Angus, argued that Musk "has engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada," including using "his wealth and power to influence our elections." Over 263,000 Canadians signed within weeks, making it one of the most popular parliamentary petitions in recent history.
This is the same Musk who spent $277 million supporting Trump's 2024 campaign, then was appointed to head Trump's "Department of Government Efficiency." He had already called Prime Minister Trudeau an "insufferable tool" in January, adding "Won't be in power for much longer." Meanwhile, EU leaders have branded him persona non grata over what they consider "foreign interference" in European politics through his X platform.
Meanwhile, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg—controlling 61% of voting power despite owning only 14% of shares—eliminated fact-checking in January 2025 without consulting any government. His appointment of Republican lobbyist Joel Kaplan as policy chief signals platform alignment with specific political interests.
The human cost compounds daily. 28.59% of Canadian adolescents report high psychological symptoms linked to social media use, according to Health Canada. Hospital admissions for teenage self-harm increased 110% between 2009 and 2014, tracking social media adoption.
Imagine being the parent watching your teenager spiral. The platform's algorithm has identified what keeps them scrolling—eating disorder content, self-harm communities, endless comparison. You can't delete the account without severing their entire social world. The platform owns their friendships, their self-image, their reality.
$9.6 billion in Canadian advertising revenue flows to Google and Meta annually. That's not just money leaving—it's the economic foundation of Canadian media being extracted. 516 local news outlets have closed since 2008. In their place? Algorithms and garbage companies.
Every system constrains us. The question is whether we'll have agency in choosing which constraints.
The Canadian Paradox
Here's what makes this dependency absurd: We invented the tools of our own digital age.
Java, the programming language that powers Android phones, enterprise systems, and billions of devices worldwide, emerged from Canadian ingenuity. James Gosling, born near Calgary and educated at the University of Calgary, initiated the Java language project at Sun Microsystems in June 1991 alongside Mike Sheridan and Patrick Naughton. Originally called "Oak" after a tree outside Gosling's office, the language was renamed Java and released in May 1995 with its revolutionary promise: "write once, run anywhere." This Canadian creation became the foundation for modern enterprise computing, mobile applications, and web services—yet today, 66% of our software engineering graduates leave to build Java applications in Silicon Valley.
Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency and the platform enabling smart contracts, decentralized finance, and Web3 applications, was conceived in Toronto. Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum whitepaper in November 2013 while living in the city, proposing a blockchain with "a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language" that could execute smart contracts—self-executing agreements that eliminate intermediaries. After receiving a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship in 2014, the Toronto-born programmer dropped out of university to build what would become a $200+ billion ecosystem. The platform that promises to decentralize the internet itself was born from Canadian innovation, yet our government still depends on centralized American platforms.
ActivityPub, the very protocol that makes the Fediverse possible, has deep Canadian roots. Evan Prodromou, a Montreal-based developer, co-authored the ActivityPub specification that became a W3C standard in 2018. As chair of the W3C's Federated Social Web Community Group and creator of StatusNet, pump.io, and identi.ca—early pioneers of federated social networking—Prodromou has spent two decades building alternatives to platform monopolies. The Social Web Foundation he co-founded in 2024 continues this work, promoting ActivityPub adoption globally. The protocol that could free us from Silicon Valley's grip was co-created by a Canadian working from Montreal, yet we haven't deployed it for our own digital sovereignty.
We've successfully run a complex federal system for 157 years. Quebec maintains distinct society status while participating in Confederation. Alberta operates healthcare differently than Ontario, yet health cards work everywhere. We speak different languages, follow different provincial laws, maintain different cultures—all while remaining Canadian.
We pioneered public broadcasting with the CBC. Built credit unions when banks ignored rural communities. Created crown corporations for services too important to trust to markets.
We know how to build alternatives. We've done it before.
Yet digitally, we've surrendered to Silicon Valley. We train our children to code, then watch 66% of software engineering graduates leave for the US. We create decentralization protocols, then depend on centralized platforms. We run successful federalism, then submit to digital monarchy.
The question isn't whether we can build sovereign infrastructure. We already proved we can.
The question is whether we will.
We've balanced autonomy and coordination since 1867. The digital realm shouldn't be different.
Act II: Building Our Own Constraints
Federation: Email for Everything Else
The Fediverse works like email.
You have Gmail. Your friend has Outlook. You can still message each other. Neither Google nor Microsoft can stop you from switching providers without losing your contacts. That's federation—separate servers, common protocol, preserved connections.
Now apply that to social media. You're on mstdn.ca. Your colleague's on mastodon.social. You can follow each other, share posts, have conversations. If mstdn.ca's policies change, you can move to another server without losing your network. If Zuckerberg owned email, this wouldn't be possible.
That's the difference.
Consider the volunteer who maintains mstdn.ca's servers. Imagine them at 3 AM, fixing database issues for 35,000 users who mostly donate nothing. Why? "Every time Meta bans someone, every time Musk manipulates the algorithm, a few more people find us," they might say. "We're not building a platform. We're building infrastructure."
The honesty matters: Federation doesn't prevent concentration. Gmail controls 30.7% of email despite federated protocols. Mastodon.social already shows similar concentration patterns. The difference is exit rights. You can leave Gmail without losing email. You can't leave Facebook without losing Facebook.
That distinction—between switching costs and network effects—determines whether you own your digital presence or rent it.
What Works, What Doesn't
Let's be brutally honest about federation's track record.
What Works:
The European Union runs 40 institutional accounts on EU Voice, making them the largest governmental presence on the Fediverse globally. Germany operates social.bund.de for verified official communications. The Netherlands built social.overheid.nl specifically to maintain sovereignty over government communications.
In Canada, mstdn.ca hosts 35,000 users including The Tyee and CIRA. When Twitter experienced instability in November 2022, Mastodon gained 2.5 million users while maintaining stability.
CIRA actively uses mstdn.ca for real engagement—here promoting their October 1 Cybersecurity Month event with 15 Canadian businesses, posted September 30, 2025
This isn't a dormant institutional account. CIRA—the organization managing Canada's .ca domain—uses federation for actual community engagement, promoting events featuring local .CA businesses and panels on digital trust. Real use, real engagement, real sovereignty in action.
What Doesn't:
User retention is terrible. After peaking at 2.5 million monthly active users, Mastodon dropped to 1.7 million—roughly 37% retention. People accustomed to algorithmic feeds find chronological timelines boring. Those expecting Twitter's reach discover smaller communities.
Content moderation becomes complex across federated instances. Each server has different standards. Content deleted on one instance persists on others. Coordinating responses to illegal content requires cooperation between administrators who may not agree on definitions.
Technical barriers frustrate average users. Choosing an instance confuses newcomers. The paradox: simplifying federation often means hiding its benefits.
The Real Costs:
According to mstdn.ca's public reports, the instance needs $1,548 monthly for infrastructure serving 35,000 users—about $0.44 per user. But that relies on volunteer moderation. Professional operation for government or enterprise would cost significantly more—likely $200,000-500,000 annually for proper staffing, security, and compliance.
WHERE FEDERATION ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
✓ Government announcements
→ Verification built into domain names
→ Can't be algorithm-buried or deleted
✓ Emergency communications
→ Works when platforms fail or block content
→ Direct control during crises
✓ Professional/academic networks
→ Data stays under Canadian law
→ No surveillance capitalism
✓ Municipal consultations
→ Local focus, not global noise
→ Community moderation standards
✗ Marketing campaigns (need Meta's reach)
✗ Customer acquisition (need targeting algorithms)
✗ News distribution (need viral mechanics)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Cost: $200-500K/year for professional instance
Reach: Thousands, not millions
Trade-off: Sovereignty over scale
Federation works for specific needs where control matters more than reach. It's not about replacing platforms—it's about having alternatives when platforms fail us.
Why Canada Can Actually Do This
The abstract theory is boring. The concrete reality is compelling.
When Quebec receives $13.3 billion in federal equalization payments while Alberta receives zero yet contributes billions, but Alberta health cards still work in Montreal hospitals, that's working federation with real money and real stakes. We move $25.3 billion annually in equalization transfers between provinces while maintaining distinct systems. If we can make healthcare federation work with that scale of complexity and those financial flows, we can make digital federation work.
When Academic Twitter collapsed in 2022, 7,505 academics initially fled to Mastodon. Within a year, 68% had given up and returned to Twitter—showing social media federation isn't easy even for highly technical users. The pattern repeated after Trump's 2024 election: Mastodon downloads increased 47% and gained 90,000 new accounts in November alone, but most academics still struggle to maintain consistent activity on decentralized platforms.
Yet Canadian universities already operate successful federated infrastructure—just not for social media. Scholaris, launched in 2024, federates institutional repositories across 23 Canadian universities including Toronto, Calgary, McGill, and Queen's. Built on DSpace open-source software and hosted in Canadian university-owned data centers by Scholars Portal, it proves Canadian institutions can collaborate on sovereign digital infrastructure. Each university maintains its branded repository while sharing technical infrastructure, expertise, and costs—exactly the federation model social platforms need.
The difference? Institutional commitment backed by professional funding. Scholaris isn't run by volunteers posting between lectures. It's operated by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), and University of Toronto Libraries—organizations that understand digital infrastructure requires sustainable operations, not idealistic volunteering.
The question isn't whether Canada understands federation—we've been running one of the world's most complex federal systems for 157 years, and our universities are already federating research infrastructure through Scholaris. The question is whether we'll expand that expertise from academic repositories to public communication infrastructure before the next platform crisis hits us unprepared.
We're not importing foreign technology. We're applying proven Canadian governance principles—already operational in Scholaris—to communication protocols.
Act III: Pushing Our Own Boulder
Three Futures
THE PLATFORM CRISIS TIMELINE
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2021 ── Facebook outage: 3.5 billion users offline for 6 hours
2022 ── Musk buys Twitter → Mastodon gains 2.5M users
2023 ── Meta blocks Canadian news: 21M Canadians affected
2024 ── X spreads US election disinfo, Trump wins with Musk's $277M
2025 Jan ── Musk: "Trudeau insufferable tool"
2025 Feb ── Musk: "Canada isn't real country" (deleted)
└─ 263,000 sign citizenship revocation petition
2025 ── Meta eliminates fact-checking globally
2026 ── Canada builds federated emergency system?
└─ Or waits for next crisis?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Three realistic paths forward:
Status Quo: Keep waiting for the next crisis. Meta blocks something else. Musk manipulates another election. We complain, adapt, repeat.
Corporate Capture: Bell, Rogers, and Telus build "Canadian" platforms. Same problems, maple leaf logo.
Targeted Federation: Build alternatives for specific needs—emergency alerts that can't be blocked, government communications under Canadian law, professional networks with actual data residency. Not replacing Instagram. Building backstops for when Instagram fails.
What Actually Works
What You Can Do Today:
□ Create account on mstdn.ca (5 minutes)
□ Follow 10 Canadian accounts (10 minutes)
□ Post weekly for one month
□ Move one group or community
□ Tell one person who understands
The #cdnpoli hashtag thrives on Mastodon with 621 posts and 180 participants daily, discussing everything from Alberta's education policies to Atlantic current collapse. Real political discourse, happening on infrastructure we control. The revolution isn't coming—it's compiling.
For Organizations:
Join existing instances first. The Tyee and CIRA already use mstdn.ca successfully. Learn before building.
Budget realistically: $1,548 monthly for basic infrastructure, $200,000+ annually for professional operation. Compare to platform advertising costs—the federal government spent $10 million annually on Meta before the ban.
For Government:
Learn from Scholaris. Canadian universities already federate digital infrastructure successfully—23 institutions sharing DSpace repositories while maintaining local control. Apply that model to government communications.
Start where sovereignty matters most:
- Emergency communications (can't be blocked by foreign platforms)
- Official announcements (following Canadian law, not platform policies)
- Public consultations (data stays in Canada)
- Professional networks (verify government employees without platform mediation)
Follow the EU model: Begin with one department. Build competence. Expand gradually.
The Investment Case:
The $9.6 billion flowing to Silicon Valley could fund Canadian alternatives. Not replacing advertising (businesses need reach) but building sovereign infrastructure for critical communications. Scholaris proves the model works—23 universities chose Canadian-operated infrastructure over US cloud providers, keeping data, jobs, and expertise in Canada. Every library systems administrator, every DSpace developer, every data center technician represents a job that stays here instead of enriching Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud.
Federation will have problems. Instances will fold. Moderation will be messy. But when mstdn.ca goes down, it doesn't take 21 million Canadians with it. When one instance makes bad decisions, users can move. That's the point—distributed failure instead of systemic collapse.
The Reality Check
Theresa Blackburn rebuilt her website after Facebook killed 90% of her traffic. It's harder, more expensive, and reaches fewer people. She does it anyway because the alternative is letting Meta decide if Western New Brunswick deserves local news.
That's the actual choice: Accept platform control or build alternatives that are worse in every metric except one—they're ours to fix when they break.
The mstdn.ca volunteers keeping servers running at 3 AM aren't heroes. They're doing infrastructure maintenance. The 35,000 users aren't revolutionaries. They're posting about their cats on a different platform. Scholaris isn't disrupting anything. It's libraries doing what libraries do—preserving access to information.
None of this is revolutionary. It's boring infrastructure work. The same kind Canada has done for 157 years—building railways, phone lines, broadcasting systems. Now we need to do it for digital communications.
Not because it's inspiring. Because platforms failing is predictable and we need backup systems.
Resources
Try it: mstdn.ca - 35,000 users, $1,548/month operating costs
Example: The Tyee on Mastodon - Independent outlet using federation
Research: Scholaris - How 23 universities federate infrastructure
Context: CBC's Meta ban coverage
Footnotes
[^1]: River Valley Sun's engagement statistics come from multiple CBC reports. The paper saw 400,000-500,000 monthly Facebook engagements before Meta's August 2023 news ban, dropping to 40,000 website visits after being forced to create their own site.
[^2]: Just Bins Waste Disposal has increasingly become a news source for Regina residents, posting everything from leaked City Hall memos to crime scene footage, without journalistic standards or fact-checking processes.
[^3]: Tech salary comparisons based on multiple sources including TMU studies and industry reports showing Canadian tech workers earn approximately 46% less than US counterparts when adjusted for cost of living.