Where have people gone after CouchSurfing became subscriber-only?

Question

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.

Answer 1

A partial answer based on, well, claims on the CouchSurfing subreddit and other gossip here-and-there:

• Indeed, BeWelcome.org seems to be the most common alternative people have chosen.
• Couchers.org was started recently, with the CS paywall coming up. It may have more users than you might expect for a new initiative which is still in beta.
• The number of users on TrustRoots has increased significantly, and is now apparently 60K.
• It's possible that more people stayed on CouchSurfing than I expected, and have been willing to pay. But there isn't any meaningful evidence to back this possibility.

Finally, one needs to remember than the number of CS users was likely inflated. That is, many accounts were likely tombstones; and I've heard it argued that quite a few account were bot-created, although I haven't seen any evidence to support this claim. It is not easy (for me) to estimate how many active users CS had when it had 12M registered users overall.

Answer 2

Impossible to know many active members are on CS, but searching for recent logins shows poor results in most locations (recent logins < 6 months/reply rate). BeWelcome.org has 200,000 members, and do a annual clean up, that turns profiles with non-functioning email address/ lack of logins to inactive in search. 200,000 means you are likely, when using the right approach (personalized messages, full profile) find a host in most locations. Of Couse, no paywall/ no ads/ no verification fee/ registered charity/ volunteer based are the bonus points.