tl;dr we want to make sure that Trustroots exists two decades from now and unlock sharing beyond hospitality: rides, bicycles, meals, parties, etc.

Trustroots has already had a brush with death. The project lead stepped away without a word. Only one other person had access to most of the servers. We’ve seen similar issues with other hospitality sites. CouchSurfing(tm) took venture capital investment which slowly rotted out the site. Warmshowers had some management clashes. Hospitality Club has had long periods of downtime as there’s only one person running it.

Instead of just having one Trustroots, with one set of administrators, we want to have many. A network of connected sites. Maybe focused on different things. Some focused on bike tourers. Some on sharing rides. But each user’s data, it lives across multiple sites. The user themselves has control over the data. If one site dies, you can log in somewhere else and still keep all of your connections, messages, and references. No one person can step away from the project and have it all come crashing down.

Plus, people can start applications with new features. Instead of sites like couchers.org starting over and building a network from scratch, they could start from the Trustroots users. When a Trustroots user logs into to a new app, all of their data comes with them. This is the major challenge for all new networks. When there’s nobody on the network, it’s not very useful. This makes it hard to experiment, to try new features. Hopefully, we can, slowly, make this easier.

We hope this is possible on something called nostr. We’ve looked at other decentralised technologies, but nostr is the first option that seems like it might work.

We don’t have the illusion that we can move all of Trustroots over to nostr in a year. But we don’t need to. We can enable small parts and then others can build on these foundations.

If you want to help, check github.com/Trustroots/nostroots and if you read this before May 22nd 2024, check collective.trustroots.org.