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Wow fucking #couchsurfing put up a paywall so you can’t even see any of your past messages or friends without a subscription of 2$ a month, federated couch surfing when?!
in reply to wakest

can be done now, with existing Mastodon/Fediverse; I've seen the Fedi already being used to find short term and emergency accomodation for people but Fedi could do with either groups or a dedicated app. Might be worth investigating *why* Couchsurfing did this; was it simply for basic running costs or to pay lawyers/PR people following safeguarding failures and criminal cases a few years ago?
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

yeah just having an instance devoted to it with some bots that keep track of cities and stuff would go a long way
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

From what I understand from the wikipedia article, they tried to run it as a non-profit in the beginning with some financial problems. Then the BDFL turned out to not be benevolent and sold the whole thing to venture capital with predictable consequences.
I think this is mostly a case against having a BDFL
in reply to wakest

@Stoori

Bolting it on to the existing Fediverse could work as there is already a global community here who are generally friendly, well behaved, diverse in age, ethnicity, gender/sexuality etc and even with folk being privacy aware they share just enough to ascertain whether they would be trustworthy (all the other services risk creating power imbalances, especially when relative strangers are desperate to find accomodation at short notice)
in reply to wakest

Do you have any experience with http://bewelcome.org/ ?
in reply to frainz

I have an account and have lurked but never tried to stay anywhere. Have used couch surfing a ton though.
in reply to wakest

Hm, ok. I never had the guts to really try any of them, but CS always felt too corporate (made an account in 2014, I think). But each time I looked at bewelcome, there were far fewer hosts
in reply to frainz

stayed with folks in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from couch surfing. Was sorta insane how many folks there were on it using it to gain language skills from travelers.
Unknown parent

wakest
yeah I was familiar with the term couch surfing for 15 years before the .com took over the name and decided it was controlled by them
in reply to wakest

couch.stream or couch.secure are both sorta cool domains for a federated alternative
in reply to wakest

So it seems the main alternatives are:
https://bewelcome.org
https://trustroots.org
https://couchers.org
in reply to wakest

#BeWelcome is GPL2 and written in PHP
https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox

#TrustRoots is MIT and looks to be in NodeJS
https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots

#Couchers is also MIT and looks like they are going with Python, TypeScript and React
https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers
in reply to wakest

@onan maybe the first step is to open issues in all three of these projects and propose federation. They may not have ever heard of the idea or know that the #fediverse exists at all.
in reply to wakest

out of all 3, #Couchers seems to have taken the most effort to fully address the human/community safeguarding issues that plague any service like this (incidentally, I'm not sure if people realise that in many countries the moment they invite someone into their house they incur a formal legal duty of care to look after them and can incur legal penalties if things go wrong...)
in reply to wakest

#BeWelcome already has an open issue since 2018: https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox/issues/90

#TrustRoots already has an issue as well: https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/issues/2287

#OpenHospitalityNetwork already has a fork of Trustroots who is working on adding ActivityPub: https://github.com/OpenHospitalityNetwork/fedi-trustroots/issues

Tagging @weex because I see them in the issues there already
in reply to wakest

Thanks to a few folks for pointing out the already existing discussion on SocialHub about hospitality exchange (I didn’t know this term before) https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/hospitality-exchange-community-considers-moving-to-the-fediverse/1765
in reply to wakest

And thanks to @humanetech for starting a discussion about this on another part of the fediverse: https://lemmy.ml/post/66076
in reply to wakest

there is discussion right now in the @ohn #Matrix chatroom. The HN article led some new people to the room.
in reply to wakest

A random coincidence: someone submitted an article that made it to the front page of hacker news about this issue right before I started posting about this today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28583583
in reply to wakest

When I was looking for a new job in 2016, I almost worked for the guy that bought the rights to it, and was trying to bring it back.

I ended up taking a different direction, especially after somebody told me the guy was kind of unhinged. But, I always kind of wondered about what happened to CS.
in reply to Sean Tilley

Please support Mariah, let's federate couchsurfing:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/hospitality-exchange-community-considers-moving-to-the-fediverse/1765

also
https://github.com/WelcometoMyGarden/welcometomygarden/issues/108

and then it would appear on the sick ActivityPub map I am doing now for redaktor in the other window.
Would be nice if it has an `icon` property with e.g. a couch svg … :)
in reply to Sebastian Lasse

thank you Sebastian for posting the link to the SocialHub thread I didn’t think to look there but glad so much already came up over there!
Unknown parent

wakest
it’s really a rather large backstabbing of community trust
in reply to wakest

Yah... @Sasha did a good blog post about this https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/2020/05/26/the-death-of-couchsurfing/ and we too wondered how can a federated such platform look like. I think this is where that discussion happens https://github.com/OpenHospitalityNetwork/fedi-trustroots/

reshared this

in reply to Tio

thanks for the article, it’s funny even there people are thinking about the federated potential in the comments. Mentions of #matrix and #activitypub. It’s incredible to me to think of how many areas of the internet would be better served if federated protocols became standard practice
in reply to wakest

I see you are the maintainer of https://directory.trade-free.org so you are already more familiar with this space. I hadn’t seen your directory before. It seems a rather similar initiative to https://switching.software but with less focus on the software part
in reply to wakest

very cool website will have a closer look. thanks!
Unknown parent

wakest
I wonder how close that codebase would fit. That’s a good idea!