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Comment by gmargari | Hacker News Reader

So sad to see this aggressive shift. I have made many good friends from Couchsurfing, and I was paying the annually fee both to support the site and to be "Verified by CouchSurfing". Even though on March they received my annually payment, today after reading this article I tried to login to CS after some months, only to find out I had to pay _again_ to even access my profile. I could not see my photos, references, messages, nothing.

I'm really disappointed and sad, and I guess I'm also switching to BeWelcome.

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Have a look at Trustroots, the management of the project is quite different and doesn't put the same emphasis on formal democratic processes as BeWelcome does, but it makes for a community that's closer to what seems to me the authentic couchsurfing spirit. All of these hospex networks brought me a lot anyway.

I'm one of the Trustroots contributors, you're right about the governance topic, we have a do-ocracy approach right now (described a bit at the bottom of https://www.trustroots.org/faq/foundation). I'm actually keen to evolve this, with a more specific approach to community-governance, but this thinking and these talks take time.

I'm perfectly happy with the current style of governance. It seems like it works, while BeWelcome is still struggling with endless babbling.

Thanks for the link abyssin, indeed seems very interesting. Btw, I tried accessing my profile from Wayback Machine and got a nice "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine". Really Couchsurfing?

Also, I forgot to mention that the message you get when you login to couchsurfing.com is a landing page that says: "Due to the impact of Covid-19, we need your immediate help to keep Couchsurfing alive" and then the only options you have are: 1. Pay with Credit Card 2. Pay with PayPal 3. Logout (https://imgur.com/g7QKHEt)

Their site totally looks like ransomware.

I just tried to search for my city on BeWelcome to check it out. When I search from the landing page, I get a CSRF token error. When I then try to search again from the search page, I get a 404 /search/map not found. It seems they still have some way to go..

3 days later it's still the same

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