Technical 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.

Restored from backup

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 14:10:46 +0100

We lost access to the latest version of this blog. I restored from the most recent backup that I had. Some posts have been lost. It’s not clear if we will be able to restore them.

Some parts of the blog might not work properly. Hopefully in time these will be fixed.

What's brewing at the Collective?

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 12:51:59 +0200

Hey folks!

Near one of the longest virgin beaches of Spain, the mixture of work, sun and sea brought this great energy into the community of Trustroots: lots of new people ready to team up and work online! Growing the roots!

Tech boost

It’s really nice to see this much geekery from 10 different people in just one week

Online activity on Slack and GitHub has increased massively. A large part of this flurry of activity is thanks to Hacktoberfest where we show up on the main page at times.

Hitchwiki + Trustroots Install Party

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 17:42:34 +0200

Geeks!

We’re in Berlin hacking on both

Hitchwiki.org

and Trustroots.org codebases.

If you’d like to see how to get these projects running locally on your computer and volunteer working on them, come over and we’ll show you exactly how!

Useful knowledge for Hitchwiki:

PHP
Javascript
MediaWiki

Useful knowledge for Trustroots:

Javascript
NodeJS
AngularJS
MongoDB
ExpressJS
ElasticSearch

You could also be interested in starting to write a native mobile app either for Trustroots or Hitchwiki.

We're now testing with Browserstack

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 12:05:29 +0200

Test driven development

is great. Before you create new features or fix a bug you first write a test case that covers the specific issue. In the long run this means that you’re avoiding unforeseen side effects and that the entire code base is a lot more stable.

Selenium

testing is great in that you’re testing your web project in an actual browser. It’s a pain to run 38 different browsers on 7 different platforms though. Fortunately there’s a service that can handle that for you:

How we "use" Facebook

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:04:10 +0100

Photo by

mkhmktg (Creative Commons).

It seems there is a misunderstanding about how we’re using Facebook. I’m getting some signals that some people don’t want to sign up “because of Facebook”. Let me clarify three things about what we do with Facebook.

There is no and there never will be any obligation to have a Facebook account to use Trustroots.
It’s not possible to sign up with Facebook, it’s merely possible to link your Trustroots account to Facebook. More than half of current users have done so.
If a user has linked their Facebook account with us we’ll use their profile picture if the user hasn’t set a Gravatar image. This is using the Facebook Social Graph and if you don’t want FB to receive any data from you you should set up e.g. Ghostery. Or help with this issue.

Then there are some ideas that we’ll work out at some point: