For a good decade, CouchSurfing was an extremely popular hospitality exchange website, with 100x the membership of alternatives like bewelcome.org. However, CS commercialized, and gradually started becoming restrictive in search of income/profit, until eventually it became subscriber only during the covid-19 pandemic. A telling of its "downfall", so to speak, can be found here.

I'm assuming the vast majority of CS users are no longer on the platform, considering the upfront demand of payment (although obviously I can't verify this). I also know that BeWelcome has seen a surge of new members since 2021 - but, still, they only got ~50K-100K people. I know there are at least a couple of other hospitality exchange networks, like trustroots and warmshowers, but IIANM they're even smaller.

My question: What's happened to all those CS users? Have they completely stopped engaging with hospitality exchanges? Are they on sites I'm not aware of? Or perhaps - were the CS numbers inflated somehow, with the vast majority of members not really ever active?

Note: Please don't post purely speculative answers. If you have solid information, that's great; if you have anecdotal information, it depends on how much of it you have.

For a good decade, CouchSurfing was an extremely popular hospitality exchange website, with 100x the membership of alternatives like bewelcome.org. However, CS commercialized, and gradually started becoming restrictive in search of income/profit, until eventually it became subscriber only during the covid-19 pandemic. A telling of its "downfall", so to speak, can be found here.

I'm assuming the vast majority of CS users are no longer on the platform, considering the upfront demand of payment (although obviously I can't verify this). I also know that BeWelcome has seen a surge of new members since 2021 - but, still, they only got ~50K-100K people. I know there are at least a couple of other hospitality exchange networks, like trustroots and warmshowers, but IIANM they're even smaller.

My question: What's happened to all those CS users? Have they completely stopped engaging with hospitality exchanges? Are they on sites I'm not aware of? Or perhaps - were the CS numbers inflated somehow, with the vast majority of members not really ever active?

Note: Please don't post purely speculative answers. If you have solid information, that's great; if you have anecdotal information, it depends on how much of it you have.