(I'm the Couchers co-founder who wrote this blog post.)
Yes I agree, CouchSurfing.com went to shit through a slow process of enshittification that ended up looking like this. That's exactly why we founded Couchers.org when CouchSurfing.com put up a paywall (it was the last straw for us). We're trying to take what Couchsurfing was at its best and go further. We're solving these issues you're talking about with better moderation, better safety tools, and nudging users to behave in a way that's best for the community, etc.
I think it comes down to setting clear expectations and educating users about what it is and what it's not. We try to make it very clear and then enforce those rules very carefully. Once this happens, it's surprising how quickly the community roots out that behavior.
I don't think so: it just takes thoughtful moderation, setting clear rules, and then enforcing them. When you make it socially unacceptable on the platform, people do a good job reporting inappropriate behavior.
I think the reason that CouchSurfing.com turned into a low-key hookup app is that it was actually a profitable strat for them. They used to monetize verification (something like $60 per verification), and my hypothesis is that a large proportion of people who ever verified paid for verification soon after signing up. By being a hookup site, it actually increased the perceived value to a certain subset of people signing up, which increased signups, verification numbers, and revenue. Of course this made the experience worse on the platform itself once people tried to use it, but they could milk that "easy way to hook up" concept for a long time (basically until the pandemic killed it).
I'm one of the Couchers founders and wrote this blog post (and incidentally spend way too much time on HN), awesome to see this show up here!
This launch is the culmination of a huge push from our volunteer team to clean up a bunch of core features and make the platform easier to use. We are also launching a new branding strategy and new landing page.
Quick plug: we are looking for senior React Native devs to join us and help us get a mobile app out, as well as React/Python devs for frontend/backend. Everything we do is open source (under MIT): https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers/
Alternatives to Couchsurfing.com such as BeWelcome and WarmShowers have been around for many years, decades even and have users counts into 6 figures. They've remained non-corporate but never managed to reach mainstream popularity like Couchsurfing.com did.
What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?
Couchers Frontend Team Lead here. Aapeli is out for the night so I'm popping in to answer from my POV.
I think the main difference is that we're trying to capture the spirit of what CouchSurfing.com used to be: modern, easy to use, welcoming to newbies and centered on genuine social connection. But we also want to go beyond that. Build for today’s world—with better safety tools, better moderation, and more community-driven features that help people find each other easier.
Couchsurfing was initially about free hospitality and cultural exchange but is now largely driven by monetization. They also haven't really provided many new features to users since going for-profit.
BeWelcome is another alternative that came out of the CouchSurfing community years ago. It has a more ideological focus around democratic decision-making and they are not as newbie friendly, have an older UI, and are a bit slower to adopt new tech.
WarmShowers on the other hand is for a completely different crowd: it's for bike tourers that leave at the crack of dawn and arrive at sunset. They need a shower (hence the name), a place to put their bike, and a bed to sleep on. They'll probably be a bit too tired to socialize. That's very different from the traditional couch surfing platforms where socialization is the focus.
so couchers focus on better UI and new tech? why not join efforts with bewellcome? or are they too "democratic" and not everyone sees new tech and better UI as major improvement?
Part of it is the better UI and new tech, but there's a lot more too.
Just on that point though: there's actually another open-source platform called Trustroots. They initally started as a rewrite of the BeWelcome frontend, but because of politics and such, BW never let them merge those big changes, so they spun off. Trustroots is a cool project but I think they swung too far into the realm of anarchism in their vibe both as a platform (they are very hitchhikey, so their moderation model is extremely hands off) and as a project (they have this things called a "do-ocracy"). We think there needs to be some planning and roadmapping and a healthy mix of dev + non-dev, as well as serious moderation to keep the platform safe.
I guess their advantage is they have Couch in the name? Joking but I'm curious what the answer is here, I think everyone that remembers the Couchsurfing glory days is hoping that they or someone succeeds in bringing them back
Highly recommend integrating with the atproto network to hop onto its social graph; that could be a major differentiator for your service. I’d love to log in with my Bluesky account and see who else in my network has opted to share their couchsurfing status.
> This turns into a surprisingly intense experience. I get to meet people in their most intimate space and bond over late-night conversations in ways that never would have happened otherwise.
This is much like the couch surfing experience: staying with people for a few days and sharing their space, which often ends in these deep, late-night conversations. It's an incredible experience.
There are a few platforms for that, I recommend Couchers.org. It's free & open source (and I'm one of the core maintainers).
So if you end up being famous and talked about a lot on Wikipedia, your name will compress better?
The impact of bias in training data is interesting in general here. What's the impact on Wikipedia's article biases? That's probably one of the main corpuses used.
I wonder if AWS are shooting themselves in the foot (if these things become very popular), by making the "Cloud" a physical, tangible thing. I think part of the lustre for some customers is that they don't know what they're paying for when they start a 2 vCPU EC2 instance and must think it's something crazy complex and special. Now having it on your desk in a tiny little box will make them wonder what they pay so much for.
The other thought I have is that maybe there's a market for shipping around bytes in mail boxes not just between a business and AWS, but just any people and businesses. I've seen B2 and Dropbox (I think) also have these "we'll ship you a drive" things, but maybe they'd outsource that for example to a third party who just did it really well and cheaply.
One of the main reasons that we're running our own hardware is because it's difficult and cost prohibitive for us to get our data to a cloud provider.
We're running a sort of sneakernet between our data collection agents and our data ingestion locations, each day each location receives 2-4 encrypted SSD's (Samsung T5) with up to 1TB of data. That then gets uploaded to our central location (overnight) for processing, and the next morning they're drained and ready for the next mission.
If Amazon had launched this earlier, and our cashflow (or funding :P) a bit better then maybe we'd have opted for running a constant stream of these snowcones to Amazon. Though processing costs are also a big concern, the cloud providers are at least twice as expensive as running metal, even when looking at 1 year paying for the hardware up front, and if you're cost sensitive when buying the hardware it could be 3-4 times cheaper than the managed cloud.
What I'd be afraid of with this server is losing them in the mail. I wonder if they've got a system where you could mirror two snowcones before you send one to them.
I don't think that's a very realistic outlook. Most money spent in aws is not by noobs going over their free tier not realizing they could have bought a raspberry pi; it's by institutions that are paying for convenience and know it.
Correctly hashed (with salt and a memory+time hard hash) passwords are taken to be brute-force hard to crack.
In that sense it's as safe to publish such hashed passwords on the internet, in the same way a website's public key is published on the internet. In fact, it's good practice to set hash parameters such that it's slower to brute-force passwords than asymmetric keys (e.g. TLS certs).
However, the big difference is that TLS private keys are randomly generated, and of a fixed length, whereas passwords are user chosen. So an attacker could do a dictionary attack and probably uncover a number of passwords using that (e.g. just try out "password" on all the hashed passwords). Hashed passwords are only as hard to crack as the passwords themselves.
Given a salted hash, you can test passwords many orders of magnitude faster than you can do online. As some attackers can control a botnet, limiting attempts by ip has limited value. If you limit by username and time, you open the door to a denial-of-service attack: I could lock you out of your account by simply trying to log in as you repeatedly.
The Au Gov got the code for TraceTogether (what OpenTrace, the open source implementation of BlueTrace is based on) weeks before the source was publicly released as GPL.
I quite like this idea. It seems for now to be fairly simple: I think more "decorations" and higher detail on trees, or whatever, might be important.
It seems that it's only 2.5D though. Have you considered making it truly 3D somehow? There's a surprisingly large amount of extra space you gain with that third dimension.
Also, fun idea: what if the island evolved over time? Like every time you visit, trees grow a bit and some new trees grow next to them, so eventually you get a forest, etc. I wonder what the implications of this would be to remembering things? Would the constant change help, or no?
Yes I agree, CouchSurfing.com went to shit through a slow process of enshittification that ended up looking like this. That's exactly why we founded Couchers.org when CouchSurfing.com put up a paywall (it was the last straw for us). We're trying to take what Couchsurfing was at its best and go further. We're solving these issues you're talking about with better moderation, better safety tools, and nudging users to behave in a way that's best for the community, etc.
I think it comes down to setting clear expectations and educating users about what it is and what it's not. We try to make it very clear and then enforce those rules very carefully. Once this happens, it's surprising how quickly the community roots out that behavior.