18 posts
This blog is leaving WordPress for a static site. The move is nearly invisible — except for one thing: fediverse followers of the old WordPress actor need to re-follow me at @daniel@charlemos.club.
Our tango communities were built on Facebook. Milongas get announced there, groups get managed there, new dancers find us there. It’s essential. Irreplaceable. Or so many of us think. In December 2025, The Guardian reported that more than 50 organisations — abortion access providers, queer groups, and reproductive health networks — had their accounts removed […]
A few weeks ago, a tango friend asked me: “So what’s this fediverse thing you keep going on about?” I started explaining protocols and servers and ActivityPub — and I could see him glazing over. So I stopped. And tried something different. “You use email, right?” “Obviously.” “You’re on Gmail. I’m on my own server. […]
“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, […]
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: Below is an updated guide that shows the full journey from publisher ? aggregator ? regional calendar ? dancer. 1 […]
This is part two of my response to Filip’s questions. Apps & Fediverse Oh, what a bummer this is: there are no super polished native mobile apps for most of Fediverse’s platforms and services. Why? Because creating and maintaining mobile apps is expensive, and most of these fediverse services are made by volunteers. Except, for […]
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.
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: Step 1: New Members Section After the first log-in, it will ask you for a profile picture. You can do that now, or later. If you skip, you […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. I have just installed it on RNT – Rhein-Neckar-Tango, which hosts the event […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Here are the current test setups for the “An alternative to facebook?” that I have set up:
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 […]