For a good decade, CouchSurfing was an extremely popular hospitality exchange website, with 100x the membership of alternatives like [bewelcome.org][1]. 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][2].

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][3] 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][4] and [warmshowers][5], 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.


  [1]: https://www.bewelcome.org/
  [2]: https://www.inputmag.com/features/rise-and-ruin-of-couchsurfing
  [3]: https://www.bewelcome.org/about/stats
  [4]: https://www.trustroots.org/
  [5]: https://www.warmshowers.org/