CouchSurfing is a community where people can stay in strangers’ houses for free when travelling.
There’s also real-life weekly meetups in many places.
In May 2020, CouchSurfing started charging a monthly subscription fee and put up a paywall, locking people out of their profiles. The community is outraged, but also positive about building a new site, owned and run by volunteers. People are recreating their profiles on BeWelcome.org and Trustroots.org. Meetups are renaming. People are requesting their data under GDPR, and visualising it using Couchspinner, or archiving their profiles using archive.is.
This is a community in need of a technical solution, and I wish that Solid could be a part of that. There’s a great opportunity to make changes, particularly when deciding an API for the mobile apps for these platforms.