“Strava has been a big part of my fitness workflow for one big reason. I don’t really care about leaderboards or social features, but it acts as a great hub between devices, apps, and services. I use an Apple Watch and I also use a Garmin, and Strava lets me bridge all of these together. That setup has become a lot harder to maintain after Strava removed access to its free API tier for most consumer use cases. Since I also dabble in a range of other wearables that don’t really sync directly, this has understandably made it harder than I expected to get my fitness data synced to a common place. That pushed me to look for alternatives.”
Strava has been incredibly useful to so many athletes, but that reason is because there is a mass of users using it (ever tried getting someone to leave Facebook for Nostr?) and it has a good API allowing more crowdsourcing of data from other apps.
But we are all on borrowed time with Strava as it is a proprietary platform and is apparently filing for an IPO soon (remember when Facebook had open APIs to embrace all the 3rd party networks, and then starting shutting that access down?).
So we don’t know the full implications of this yet, but Strava will become more restrictive as things go forward.
As the linked article points out, you could self-host Endurain for similar stats for yourself, but if you are into sharing exercise stats, wanting to see similar stats, and following friends, then FitPub does look pretty good (see fitpub.social/timeline). But, of course, like with Facebook, your own friends won’t be on it! If they are anywhere on the Fediverse though, which uses ActivityPub protocol, then they can still follow you.
The challenge is to get your exercise data in easily (no complicated file syncing etc). From what I see on Pebble watches you could use an app called GadgetBridge, Garmin users are best off as Endurain natively syncs with that service, Polar uses could sync to intervals.icu and there are hooks to then pull into FitPub. Apple users may be able to use Ride Journal which can sync to FitPub.
The post mentioning the Strava API changes is at forum.intervals.icu/t/strava-a….
See xda-developers.com/strava-kill…
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