nostr on Trustroots Ideas

How we keep Trustroots free forever and ever and ever

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:10:55 +0100

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.

nostroots: first apk and progress report

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:11:30 +0200

tl;dr:

apk at github

We set up a

Nostroots home page

, with the most important information for normal users. For devs there’s https://github.com/trustroots/nostroots

And here’s (most of) the progress report that we wrote for November 2024 till April 2025.

Project updates

At November’s hackathon week we decided to go for expo.dev with react native. This has worked out well now. The alpha version of our Android app is ready for testing. If you’re feeling adventurous, grab the APK and see what we’ve built so far. You can post notes on a map, and also see geographic notes from other sources.

Nostr updates

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 10:58:17 +0200

We recently held a weekend hackathon to make notes.trustroots.org even better!

A lot of our work focused on making sure that the notes we display on our map are trustworthy. We want to avoid showing any spam or invalid content, so we’ve set up a system to verify that notes come from real Trustroots users. Our solution involves running a server that checks the source of each note and reposts it with extra information. When you add a note to the map, it creates an event, but only notes from verified users will be shown.

Moving Trustroots onto nostr

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:56:17 +0200

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.