Since the early 2010s the global tango community has been growing on Facebook. At its peak you could find most tango dancers on the largest social networking site, as well as find events, join groups, and enjoy photo album and tagging your friends.
In 2025 this is mostly still the case. But Facebook is no longer the same: its parent company has started to fully turn on the monetization machine: every third post in the feed is an ad, many of the other posts in the feed are from pages or groups that you don’t care about, and the holy algorithm that promised to show you what you care about, doesn’t do that any more.
On top of all that we have many cases of Facebook abusing the private data stored in its databases, witnessed by the legal authorities who have fined Facebook for many hundred millions of dollars… and still they are milking the network of locked in users for ad revenue. Cory Doctorow calls this #enshittification.
There is a certain unwillingness to play that game in many dancer’s heart — and while you don’t see it yet, the level of interaction is declining, as well as the willingness to participate in event groups and more. Yes, and while invasive, the tagging features of dancers in photos was very useful — and isn’t writing anymore. Maybe this was the driving force of tango networking on Facebook after all?
Where does that leave us, as the global Tango network, and the various communities in the world of Tango?
Facebook is not the only social networking platform on the planet, but for tango it has been that. Some regional communities, like Turkey, are more active on Instagram — with all its problems and lack of features like groups or events. others are talking about Bluesky, but that is just another Twitter, and that never resonated with the tango people, so why should it be any different now?
Other people have been dissatisfied with the likes of platforms like Facebook for years… is that something we can go to? Is that even a place? Is it controlled by a benevolent corporation that won’t enshittify our communication media?
Of course there is a place, and it is called the Internet. The World Wide Web by the people and for the people — it still exists, but of course it has lost a lot of its glamour and ease of finding it. There is a whole movement around the terms #indieweb and #freeweb, where anyone should be empowered to have a Web presence that suits them, and not some algorithm that only wants to maximize your engagement with ads.
In addition to that, the #fediverse consists of many social networking platforms that ask can talk to each other, and each has a different ways of interaction with the world. There is Mastodon, the free Twitter alternative, or Pixelfed, which Is centered around shared images, and Friendica, something more alike to Facebook of the good old days. Each of these software is free and open source, and anyone can create a need server for themselves and their family or friends, own their data, and connect to the rest of the Fediverse.
So, and thank you for reading this far, the idea of the Tangoverse is simple: an interconnected web of tango related services, all available and findable for the greater Tango network and Tango communities. Not driven or owned by any one person, but as a product of cooperation and networking.
The first social server that is open only for tango dancers is based on Friendica. Will you join us? https://friendica.tangoverse.org