As we announced last year, we’re evolving Trustroots into a new version of itself — one that’s more open, resilient, and user-empowered. This will be enabled by leveraging “nostr”, a decentralized network technology. For now, we call this version of Trustroots, “Nostroots”.

Wait… what? What’s all this talk about decentralized networks 🤔? I just want to keep meeting awesome people through Trustroots! Is that really necessary?

We get it. Many in our community are wondering what this means and why it matters. So let’s put the tech aside for a moment and focus on what’s truly important for our community.

Our Manifesto (2025)

We want a world that encourages trust, adventure, and intercultural connections.

Our willingness to help each other is universal.

Trustroots is completely free to use — and will remain so forever.

We believe in beauty, simplicity, and transparency.

We emphasize community and shared ownership.

We believe in digital freedom — everyone should have control over their own data.

We are deeply committed to this manifesto, especially the promise that Trustroots will always be free. When we wrote this in 2014, the dream of a free and open internet was alive and growing. We believed that if we just held on to that dream, the internet would stay open and community-driven forever.

But that’s not how things turned out. In reality, this version of the internet didn’t quite happen. Instead, it became an extractive, hyper-commercial expression for corporations. We would like to ensure that Trustroots NEVER becomes that.

To do this, we’re updating our manifesto with a crucial concept: digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty means our community — not a company or investors — controls its own digital space. It means that even if the central team changes direction, the community’s data and connections remain in their own hands. That’s why we’re rebuilding Trustroots on a more open, decentralized protocol—to make Trustroots more open, resilient, and user-empowered.

When we talk about decentralisation we mean peer‑to‑peer networks like BitTorrent. We’re building a decentralised P2P layer that runs in browsers, relays, and mobile apps. We are explicitly NOT talking about blockchains, financial/scam tokens, or any form of speculative “crypto” projects.

Unlike platforms such as Couchsurfing or Facebook, which started as communities and became businesses, Nostroots can be built upon, extended, or even forked by others if they choose— meaning the community can continue to grow and evolve even beyond us. The community isn’t held hostage by a central entity (see here for the fall of Couchsurfing 😞). Your data stays yours. Your connections stay yours. No ads, no sales, no hidden agendas. Just an app built to serve its members, not exploit them. That’s what digital sovereignty means to us: keeping Trustroots free, open, and truly resilient — no matter what happens next. By making this technical change, we ensure that the spirit, mission, and purpose will stay the same.

What does this mean for you?

Some things will change. Using a technology like a decentralized protocol has fundamentally different properties than what you may be used to today from using most websites and apps. Practically speaking you’d use a “private key” to interact with the app, that only you (not us) would have access to. How you interact on the app will feel different, and it might take a bit of time to get used to. We’re committed to making this change as smooth as possible, over time.

On the other hand, there are cool things to anticipate! We are planning new features around circles and maps aimed to facilitate more interactions in our community. But even more exciting, using nostr for Trustroots also make it A LOT easier for other people to build other gift economy projects connected to Trustroots, like bike sharing, ride sharing, parties, whatever we wish for our community. Some cool examples we are already seeing happen include lightfoot (a letter writing app) and a hitchhiking app. In this future, you can interact with any of these apps with your same private key you have on Trustroots, AND have all of your previous connections already live on those other apps.

At the end of the day, change is never easy. But we believe that the trade-off for building a new paradigm of a free, independent, and thriving gifting economy network is more than worth it. We hope that you continue to build, nurture, and make Nostroots a thriving community with us.

Interested? Here’s how you could help!

1. Join the team to build nostroots—we are looking for anyone who believes in this vision, with good vibes, who want to contribute (technical and non-technical skillsets welcome)
2. Join future events to connect with the community and build momentum
3. Kickstart your own project on nostr by connecting it to Trustroots (or more specifically one of the circles)—doing this will also help expand the ecosystem connected to Nostroots

Check out notes.trustroots.org for more and contact us if you have questions, if you want to help build nostroots or if you want to build on nostroots.