@danieldekay

It’s 2025 already, and the world is expected to change dramatically (?) this year. I am expecting more #enshittification of Facebook due to the current situation in the USA (trend towards less regulation, and more extreme populism and online sharing of hate-speech and fake news, plus AI-generated content, …). Twitter — now X — has already become a much more dirty and unpleasant place to be since Elon bought the thing. It’s happening.

So, is it time for a mass hiatus away from Facebook? Probably not. Why? For starters, there is no alternative, yet. Yes, we have tango people on Instagram sharing videos and pictures. And they say, especially in the Turkish scene, that this is a good place for the tango social sharing — besides “Facebook is for Boomers” anyhow. Bluesky is also being tried.

Will Instagram or Bluesky prevail for the global tango community? I doubt it, since we are lacking events and groups in any micro-blogging platform. They might, on the surface, do the same — but they are not social networks like Facebook is. And they might just all follow the Twitter fate, sooner or later.

What about the up-and-coming mundotango.life platform that is being initiated by Scott Boddye? It is being promoted as “the place” for the tango community, and tailored a lot towards the professionals in tango as well. Currently there is a fund raiser running on https://gofund.me/77f6c99f to get this started. Status: 600 of 15k USD raised. Not a promising sign that that tango communities, or the tango professionals are open to pay for something that will be the “new home for tango online”.

On paper, this all sounds very thought through and tailored towards what the tango communities will need. On the other hand, if it is tailored and custom built, that means it needs recurring revenue not just for running it, but also for the development and support. My estimates just for hosting a platform for tango based on existing open source software (no development) go towards a rough need for 1k USD/month just for the scale of it. And once the platform is also used to host pictures and videos, costs can go up. A mobile app for iOS and Android — additional costs. Moderation. Legal Compliance globally. You get the idea… it’s not something you can offer for free.

The biggest challenges for any future alternative are:

1. the business model. How to fund the running and development costs?
2. getting critical mass of content and users. It needs to cover the global community, or a good number of sub-communities, so that people spend time and actually create content / interact. Otherwise it will be dying slowly again.
   • this includes UX, mobile apps, use cases, value generation

Both are, of course, related and can be described as “platform economics” — maybe with the addition of “non-profit platform economics”, if that even exists.

So what really are the options we have at the moment?

1. Custom built & self-hosted
   • like mundotango.life, or the tangopartner app
2. Off the shelf & self-hosted
   • like uno.io, or any of the social plugins for Drupal, WordPress, or even standalones — these must be bought/licensed, but you also get some support
   • open-source, like Friendica, see #5
3. SAAS
   • like circle.so, Mightynetworks.
4. Existing commercial platforms
   • like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky
5. Existing decentralized open.source platforms = Fediverse
   • joining the federated space — anyone just joins wherever, and we hope it all gets coherent with time
   • hosting a group of tango-specific servers that federate (only?) with each other. This spreads the responsibility and load on many people’s shoulders, but also requires multiple people taking responsibility.