I'm one of the Couchers founders and wrote this blog post (and incidentally spend way too much time on HN), awesome to see this show up here!

This launch is the culmination of a huge push from our volunteer team to clean up a bunch of core features and make the platform easier to use. We are also launching a new branding strategy and new landing page.

Quick plug: we are looking for senior React Native devs to join us and help us get a mobile app out, as well as React/Python devs for frontend/backend. Everything we do is open source (under MIT): https://github.com/Couchers-org/couchers/

Happy to answer any questions folks might have!

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jonp888 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Alternatives to Couchsurfing.com such as BeWelcome and WarmShowers have been around for many years, decades even and have users counts into 6 figures. They've remained non-corporate but never managed to reach mainstream popularity like Couchsurfing.com did.

What are you hoping to achieve by launching another hospitality sharing site that the other established non-profit sites couldn't?

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nabramow 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Couchers Frontend Team Lead here. Aapeli is out for the night so I'm popping in to answer from my POV.

I think the main difference is that we're trying to capture the spirit of what CouchSurfing.com used to be: modern, easy to use, welcoming to newbies and centered on genuine social connection. But we also want to go beyond that. Build for today’s world—with better safety tools, better moderation, and more community-driven features that help people find each other easier.

Couchsurfing was initially about free hospitality and cultural exchange but is now largely driven by monetization. They also haven't really provided many new features to users since going for-profit.

BeWelcome is another alternative that came out of the CouchSurfing community years ago. It has a more ideological focus around democratic decision-making and they are not as newbie friendly, have an older UI, and are a bit slower to adopt new tech.

WarmShowers on the other hand is for a completely different crowd: it's for bike tourers that leave at the crack of dawn and arrive at sunset. They need a shower (hence the name), a place to put their bike, and a bed to sleep on. They'll probably be a bit too tired to socialize. That's very different from the traditional couch surfing platforms where socialization is the focus.

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vincnetas 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

so couchers focus on better UI and new tech? why not join efforts with bewellcome? or are they too "democratic" and not everyone sees new tech and better UI as major improvement?

curious where this new road will lead surfers.

	▲	aapeli a day ago \| parent [-]
		Part of it is the better UI and new tech, but there's a lot more too. Just on that point though: there's actually another open-source platform called Trustroots. They initally started as a rewrite of the BeWelcome frontend, but because of politics and such, BW never let them merge those big changes, so they spun off. Trustroots is a cool project but I think they swung too far into the realm of anarchism in their vibe both as a platform (they are very hitchhikey, so their moderation model is extremely hands off) and as a project (they have this things called a "do-ocracy"). We think there needs to be some planning and roadmapping and a healthy mix of dev + non-dev, as well as serious moderation to keep the platform safe.

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raffael_de a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I cannot select England, Northern Ireland, Great Britain ... as a visited region. Those countries are not listed.

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mattl a day ago | parent | next [-]

No United Kingdom?

	▲	raffael_de a day ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed is listed!

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aapeli a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Send a bug report and we'll add them!

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subarctic 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess their advantage is they have Couch in the name? Joking but I'm curious what the answer is here, I think everyone that remembers the Couchsurfing glory days is hoping that they or someone succeeds in bringing them back

	▲	johanyc a day ago \| parent [-]
		I do think Coucher is easier to remember than the others lol

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erlend_sh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Highly recommend integrating with the atproto network to hop onto its social graph; that could be a major differentiator for your service. I’d love to log in with my Bluesky account and see who else in my network has opted to share their couchsurfing status.

(I put up a GitHub issue)

	▲	aapeli a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, will look into it. Get in touch if you want to help out on it too!