Volunteering 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.

Trustroots Hackathon This Weekend!

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 21:41:17 +0100

This coming weekend there is another Hackathon happening! For three days and nights our team will be devoting as much time as possible working on projects like our react migration, iOS application and i18N translations.

We’re are also looking for additional volunteers who would like to support with our communications and social media presence. Besides our long term tech volunteers, there will be volunteers from our support, communications and community building teams and our friends from the Open Hospitality Network and HerAdventures will also be joining. In short, it’s going to be a hoot!

Barcelona Hacking Collective

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:42:02 +0100

Last year winter we organized an Iberian Collective in the south of Spain to activate volunteers and boost the development of Trustroots. We realized that meeting physically and saving some dates is the best way for us (the volunteers behind the social network) to focus and dedicate time to the Trustroots project.

For this reason, we are calling for another collective, a physical meetup of Trustroots volunteers, developers, supporters and anyone with the will to help. The purposes are similar as last year: work on the codebase passionately, think on new features, meet and get together in person, welcome new volunteers and make strategic decisions. And, of course, we will organize some fun activities too!

Meta Wiki Developers

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 10:33:24 +0100

mrkvon and banan arrived here a while ago and have been excellent at getting me deeper into the code base. This led to some cosmetic changes on the site, including edit buttons on some static pages such as the guide.

Related to that, we now have a wiki: wiki.trustroots.org - it’s actually not new, we simply hijacked Couchwiki, which is a wiki I was running since 2009 (when couchsurfing decided to take down the CouchSurfing Wiki - it took a couple more years to pull the final trigger).

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.

Iberian Collective

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 10:58:56 +0200

tl;dr We’re organizing a Trustroots Collective this Autumn somewhere in the South of Portugal or in Andalusia.

What

A Collective is a time and space bound group of people choosing to work non profit on the same cause they believe in, like hospitality (exchange) or contributing in helping for any other reason.

In short, we will rent a space for volunteer work on Trustroots.

Why

Trustroots has been around for a while now, and the Community is growing nicely with amazing people. This is the reason Trustroots needs some more love and help energy to keep moving on. Now it’s time to accelerate things a bit.

Trustroots Picnic Berlin

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 21:56:05 +0200

As we

wrote before

, we’re all team here in

Berlin

now working on Trustroots. Let’s have a cozy day together with the community at the lake this Tuesday (11.8.2015)!

Picnic around north-eastern end of Krumme Lanke (

map

Time: ~3pm onwards.

If you’re interested in

volunteering;

coding, translations, support etc we can have sessions about it later this week. We’ll be around for a while.

Event on Facebook

First Trustroots collective: Berlin 2015

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:33:17 +0200

From the 7th of August and onwards the Trustroots team is gathering in

Berlin

for the

first Trustroots collective

. We launched the website last December and we are very happy with the current situation. We now have an official non profit Trustroots Foundation

registered

in the UK. Almost

9000 members

strong, with a lot of activity all over the world. Mainly in Europe and mainly in Berlin, exactly as we had expected. Now it’s time for the next phase. And it’s time the 5

Taking roots

Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:15:46 +0100

Montreal CS Collective logo by

amylin

. Couch turned gray later on.

I’m writing down my own opinions, ideas and experiences, these are not necessarily shared by other team members

The roots of this website have been growing for a long time. Back in 2005 I wrote an article about how hospitality exchange websites should be based on free software and free from censorship. In August 2006 I joined the Couchsurfing Collective in Montreal. For a couple of months I traveled to amazing places with fun people while feeling the excitement of potentially changing the world in a big time, reaching a 100.000 people ready to share their homes to strangers, while working with some amazingly smart people.