| HN Mirror

Hey, Couchers backend volunteer here - this is a very good and valid question as many of us have gone through the same disappointment with Couchsurfing.com in the past. This is an excerpt from our FAQs on that topic:

"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."

https://couchers.org/faq