Project Meta
Start Year: 2024
“Let’s ditch Facebook and build a Tangoverse in the #Freeweb, #indieweb or #fediverse”.
The Fediverse is a decentralized network of “social apps” that all talk to each other, so you don’t need to have many accounts everywhere, and can still participate. Noone owns the Fediverse, and anyone can add another server — just for themselves, their friends or public — and participate.
What is possible?
What would it take?
How would it look like?
read my blog posts about the project:
Tango Connects Berlin Conference 2025
“A conference about communities in tango? Can it get more niche than that? I just want to dance.” You probably thought that, when or if you heard about Tango Connects Berlin Conference (which happened for the second time already this year). Well, it happened. And it was great and amazing, and we learned so much,…
Tango Events Without the Algorithm
The Vision (2025+) Facebook is no longer the only place to learn who’s dancing where tonight. With the open web (not the closed ad-owned social platforms) you can publish once and have your milongas appear: on your own website, on a local community calendar (e.g. rhein-neckar-tango.de), on a pan-regional aggregator (events.tangoverse.org), and in every follower’s…
Filip’s questions – Part 2
This is part two of my response to Filip’s questions. For ActivityPub, I would prefer Mastodon because of its simplicity, polished UX, and huge community behind it. The size of the existing community was especially important to me because it secured the platform’s future development. I like the idea you’ve presented, which is that website…
Getting started with Friendica
So, you have taken the first step into a friendica server? And you log in, and then what? Here are the first three steps you should take: New Members Section Understand the Navigation Menu Create your first post as an Introduction with hashtags Step 1: New Members Section After the first log-in, it will ask…
Expectation Management
What we will need to understand is: a non-Facebook place will not be like Facebook. It may look like it, or similar, but it won’t be that. This means. We will lose some things, and need to change some behavior and customs. It won’t be for free. Someone needs to pay for servers and especially…
Tangoverse, update 2025-02-09
I am currently digging deeper into fediverse applications for the tangoverse as described before. It was a great occasion to reset my virtual server and configure it using yunohost, which allows for much more easy management and operations, I hope, than my old setup. Currently in the test bed are the social network apps Friendica,…
Tangoverse: connecting Pages/Groups with RSS feeds
One of the key ideas of a federated and connected Tangoverse is that we can re-use existing web sites and content, and bring that into the social networking apps. The common ways to do that are 1) RSS feeds, 2) ActivityPub extensions and 3) custom code. This post is just about including RSS feeds. RSS…
How might a tangoverse ecosystem look like?
One of the big advantages of Fediverse is that many different services can interact with each other. That doesn’t mean that you can log in and use every server with the same identity, but you can follow and comment on most things you might see in a Fediverse stream in some way. Also, every service…
2025 – is the “Alternative to Facebook” finally in sight?
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…
WordPress Events can now be shared across ActivityPub
Wonderful news! Finally, the “Event Bridge for ActivityPub” has been released as a WordPress plugin. It allows for enabling the event post type created by many of the Events plugins for WordPress to be accessed via the ActivityPub feed of a page. https://event-federation.eu/2025/01/04/event-bridge-for-activitypub-plugin-released-on-wordpress-org/ I have just installed it on RNT – Rhein-Neckar-Tango, which hosts the…
Some TangoVerse scenarios from the “event feature” perspective
A few more thoughts for project TangoVerse: As detailed in What makes Facebook so useful?, one key feature for an alternative to Facebook for the tango community are events, both from the organizing and marketing side, but also from the participating side, especially for events that attract traveling dancers. I think local milongas are often…
An alternative to facebook?
A few years ago (2015-ish) I started a Facebook group called “An Alternative to Facebook for the Tango Community”. It was meant to attract interested community members to explore what is out there and to contain ideas and evaluations of possible options. Facebook back then was quite good and still had graph search, and wasn’t…
What makes Facebook so useful?
The tango network has been using Facebook for more than a decade, and many are using Facebook predominantly for their tango life, which doesn’t just include the dance as an activity, but also a great way to make friends, participate in community, or travel. Tango has been proven over and over again that it becomes…
Fediverse and events coming from WordPress
Today, I found out about a new project that wants to bring events management through WordPress into the Fediverse (@blog). Which, if it works, would be amazing, especially because there are so many great event plugins for WordPress already… for example, RNT – Rhein-Neckar-Tango uses the excellent The Event Calendar plugin. The team is collaborating…
Getting our hands dirty
Here are the current test setups for the “An alternative to facebook?” that I have set up: https://tango-travels.mn.co – based on Mighty Networks https://humhub.dekay.org https://hubzilla.dekay.org https://friendica.dekay.org