Strava is an absolute nightmare to use. My feed is absolutely chock full of ads and dog-walkers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy they’re taking a 0.2 mile walk around their block and logging their progress, but I don’t need to see it. Nike, TrainerRoad, Zwift, Peloton all have giant ads every time their users upload an activity. And I don’t understand it because it’s not an ad-supported network. Like I would happily pay to have all this shit hidden. It would be extremely simple for Strava to fix this, which would just be to provide me with a simple filter for what type of activities I’d like to see. The fact that they haven’t done so, a long time ago, leads me to believe that they simply don’t want to, for whatever reason. Plus they’ve already begun to enshittify by breaking integrations with third parties.
Are there any good options for this?
E: to be clear, I’m asking about the social aspect of Strava.
This looks like a bunch of random activity logs. Where is the social aspect?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t. Post about your trips where you want, you can then refer to the OSM trace.
People have given consent for you to improve OSM with that data though. For example, one GPS trace can be pretty inaccurate (especially under a canopy where aerial imagery also doesn’t work) but you can compile a dozen (get them with a location-specific query) and get a very good average. You can message people about those edits, and add notes.
Also, StreetComplete gives you achievements for completing quests and uploading traces. They are automated but it makes it look like actual people are grateful. Of course most people who use OSM will never actually thank the contributors but you’re still doing a great service by improving the map around you.
How do you have a “community” without any social aspect?
I can’t even see it on a map? All I can see is a white line. Seems like it could be a good product to integrate into another platform.
How do you record with that? Is there some sort of hardware integration?
The map is a community effort and the lack of social features, which caters to introverts, keeps focus on the end goal - an accurate map of the world. Other platforms are suitable for social activities and you can link to your OSM trace from there.
Yes, seeing the trace geometry only with no map is a letdown. That’s why I suggested the visualizer in another comment. It would certainly improve the shareability of traces.
OSM doesn’t produce any hardware. They are a wiki-based world mapping effort. In addition, they run a PNG tile provider (so you can embed their map on a website), an article wiki for how to edit the map etc. and the trace repository.
You can use OSM and record traces using various apps mentioned on their wiki.
I know what OSM is, thank you. I don’t use apps for a variety of reasons. I spent good money on a bike computer for that.
Good bike computers like Garmin’s allow GPX export so HW compatibility is there. It’s a few manual steps but you can make the process automatic for example by syncing your HW tracker to Tapiriik (15+ brands supported), which then can auto-download GPX files to your computer via Dropbox (or without Dropbox if you run it locally), and then you can auto-upload those to OSM with one of these scripts running on your machine.
Cool, thanks!
Come to think of it, OSM traces include timestamps and elevation for each recorded point, plus maybe other data from the uploaded GPX file. Maybe someone will create a Strava-style visualizer that serves HTML, SVGs or PNGs from trace IDs with a map, speed and elevation profile for easy sharing. Imagine your trace is
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/hagu/traces/11959920and you changeopenstreetmap.orgwith perhapsopenstreetmap-traceview.organd get a nice sharable overview that also has a PNG for preview on socials. Maybe even a page with a list of activities by user including kilometer stats by month, mode of transport etc.