wakest likes your bugs ⁂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?!
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK@liaizon 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?
frainz@vfrmedia @liaizon 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
I think this is mostly a case against having a BDFL
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)