Mastodawn

Why anti-strava?

Michal Bryxí

@runspired.com
Poor #UX:
- There are many, trivial, features that still exist only on desktop and not on mobile. I constantly have to figure out URL for an app screen and open it in browser to do what I want. Downloading GPX of a route for trivial example. An existence of in-app chat that exists only on mobile for horrifying one.
- Notifications don’t filter. I don’t care about likes. I do about comments. How do I filter?

Downloading gpx is easy but also not something you should be doing manually except in niche scenarios - just sync them to device - much nicer!

Generally I find the UX nice - one of the very few apps I love paying for. What’s surprising is that there’s something you find on desktop not on mobile … I rarely find a feature on desktop not on mobile - usually it’s the opposite!

Notifications - as someone that regularly gets 100s of likes on basic activities, never found it to be an issue. You can turn them off if you want by category but I haven’t as generally strava does a good job of condensing them into only a few notifications. Just turn off kudos in push settings.

@runspired.com As someone with ADHD I do have regular problems with notifications as they are designed on every device to be emphereal. I see it, I click, I get distracted, it’s gone. So if there is no persistent, filter able view, there is no way for me to tell what I’ve missed.

@runspired.com Either direction si plain wrong. We’re in 2026. Apart from limited screen real estate I can do anything I want on both devices.
The case with desktop was the GPX download. The case with chat was me finding an unread message after one year of using the app only on desktop.

Downside of being a tiny data driven company I guess. They focus on where users are using and on what they are using on each platform.

@runspired.com Happy to expand on this over a 🍺. This has too much to react correctly 🙃

@runspired.com Sorry, but that’s nothing up to anyone but user to decide. Strava maps are not bad, but certainly severely limited for what me&people around me are doing. They don’t have the layers nor the different granularity of details for base maps over here. So downloading GPX and porting it to other, more suited software is the base requirement.

Again - sync it. I sync all my routes (thousands of them) straight to my Garmin.

There is only one scenario you shouldn’t use strava for mapping and it’s pretty niche: back country off-trail. Very valid use case but it’s less than .0001% of the population.

@runspired.com Sorry but no. People and especially IT people telling other people how to use or not use a technology is such a bad habit we built in our privileged bubble.
Strava for mapping, for me, is borderline useable. You might have different experience or opinion, but mine is valid.

@runspired.com Use case: People send me planned route on Strava. I want to check hour by hour weather en route (#Komoot), I want to check current snow levels (#MeteoSchweiz), I want to check avalanche risk (#WhiteRisk), I want to check trail closures (#SwissTopo), I want to have it on a phone in an app that has actually useable maps (#Locus).

None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by Strava.

For each of them I need a GPX.

@runspired.com And this is not me imagining faffs. This is what many adventures here need.

I’m just one of the few who sees how bad IT is with providing solutions to people because I do have the knowledge and imagination to see a better world. And do have enough time on my hands to complain.

But this discussion went really off the rails 🫪

@runspired.com I’m seriously happy if Strava works for you. For me it’s one of the platforms I’d like to replace. I don’t see them as evil or bad. Just lacking sufficiently enough to shop around. And Fedi based platform is what I’d like to have anyways.

@runspired.com
- Constant upsell. Starting from the petty ones when you are not subscriber (ooookaaay, capitalism) to just doof ones when they promote clubs, challenges, people, etc in the same way social networks do. Polluting the feed and why I open it - actual people.
- Recent 2stage UX change to editing just finished activities is just pure hell. Who decides which fields to show & which need “advanced” edit? I do need to open advanced most of the times.

It’s super cheap, and its premium features are best in class by a million miles… But I’ve also paid for premium for over a decade so no idea what the upsell experience is like. They don’t do ads…. If you don’t like what a club is putting in your feed, leave the club.

The refreshing thing is that they literally don’t do what other social networks do: - they don’t sell your data - they don’t sell ads - they don’t give you sponsored posts or profiles - and they only give you an algorithmic feed of who you follow if you want. I default to time based.

@runspired.com Yup. I do like that as well. Don’t get me wrong there are things they are doing IMO right / better than the alternatives.

@runspired.com This is not about content that I signed up for. This is about them deciding what I should see. Which, again, they don’t have settings for.
There are 5 “internal ads” (could attach only 4 images for some reason) in my feed of 30 latest posts. That’s 1/6th of the content. In premium.

@runspired.com #Ethical:
- Bought and killed #FatMap. Many people around me are very bitter about this.
- Safety features are part of premium tier.
- While I personally enjoy FlyBys, many people are caught by surprise by the fact that they can be stalked so easily. Technically what I’m using it for, so I do feel them.

Flybys are opt-in, though for a while they weren’t. Made more sense when strava was younger and fewer people. Privacy is not part of premium… unless you mean something else. Never heard of FatMap, must have been very regional specific.