Wait, is this a rebrand of couchsurfing.org?
replies(4):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing#Change_to_a_for-p...
This is the phoenix rising from the enshittification, as is tradition.
> Couchers, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization ... [incorporated] in the United States in late 2021, and the project was moved under the purview of this new non-profit in early 2022.
Anyway to answer the question, we are totally separate from Couchsurfing.org!
We created Couchers in 2020 after Couchsurfing put up a pay wall, after going for-profit and going downhill for awhile.
We want to keep the original Couchsurfing spirit alive, so we started Couchers.org.
Couchsurfing started as a 501c3:
https://blog.couchsurfing.com/a-letter-from-co-founder-casey...
"How will you prevent this platform from ever becoming a for-profit like Couchsurfing™ did?
We fundamentally believe that attempting to make a profit out of couch surfing is a bad idea. It introduces incentives that damage the community and would not make financial sense — the couch surfing idea, based on non-transactional experiences, is not monetizable. This is about societal value, not monetary value.
We are keeping the platform as a non-profit forever. Our plan to follow this relies on three fundamental pillars:
1. We are legally established as a non-profit foundation, and our constitution contains provisions that prevents the company from ceasing to be a non-profit, or transferring its assets to an entity that is not a non-profit.
2. We will carry out a policy of distributed moderation, so that we will engage hundreds of moderators as volunteers around the world to moderate their own communities. We will make the platform reliant on volunteers, and so the entity controlling the platform could not be a for-profit business without violating laws in many countries. The foundation would have to remain as a non-profit to continue operating.
3. Our code base is open source and anybody can spin up an alternative instance. If the community ever comes to feel that the leaders of the platform are not acting in their interest, they can simply fork the codebase, making a copy that is under control of new management.
Finally, we do hope that you can trust our Founders (Aapeli and Itsi) and Board Members in their promise to keep the platform not only community-led, non-profit, and open-source, but in line with the greater interests of the global couch surfing community."