Man that's a bad way to do it, and it makes me really sad. Couchsurfing has been awesome but this is probably good for the community long-term since the motives of a large part of the users and CS where wildly misaligned after becoming a for-profit corp. With the nail in the coffin hopefully this will lead to a migration to some platform run by the community itself. Trustroots seems like the best existing option right now for future development.
Trustroots has a nice map-based interface, but lacks references and meetups. BeWelcome is my preferred option, and is open-source and has excellent financial transparency.
It's possible to export my data from CS. Would the Trustroots community be willing to have a CS data import option, for bringing in old CS references and friends?
This is a big deal actually. From what I've heard, One of the reasons why Hospitality Club fell into decline, was that the code-base was closed source and the original developer was reluctant to let go of it.
The open source bit allows the ultimate step of forking the whole project, and that is important to me to be able to do that, but it's not a trivial step at all, and a lot of the usefulness is in the name recognition and the userbase.
But really, I want to contribute to the original project, and given I am not the original developer, it still relies on the them (and any other founders) to open up contributions. Fortunately, in this case, they have :)
