Didn't know @lehtimaeki had a YouTube channel! Subscribed right away. I've been thinking about leaving Strava too, but since I already use Meta services and other corporate platforms, I've stayed, mostly because their API still works. I use it on a small scale to save my runs to a cached JSON file that I can pull into different apps I've built, and I still enjoy the social aspect.
I use around 20 different running apps out of curiosity, and honestly, there are no real alternatives to social running apps. 99% of them are for tracking. If I had the time, I'd build "my own Strava" or even a decentralized running app. But for now, I'll stick with Strava, it works fine for me. I like my "running feed", one single source of truth for all my runs.
For reading, I switched to the Bookshelf app from Goodreads years ago (https://getbookshelf.com). I lost the social aspects of reading, but I don't really miss them since I read alone anyway. There are platforms like Hardcover, StoryGraph, and Bookwyrm, but each of them seems to lack something, whether it's a proper app, features, or decent UI, so I stick with Bookshelf, which is completely local and has a nice user interface.
The way I see it, we have to live with these cognitive dissonances: either choose independence and stay mostly alone or accept the corporate walled gardens for the social features. I use both, roughly 50/50 commercial and open source apps. For the commercial ones, I try to keep control of my data as much as possible by keeping backups, saving to JSON/log/database, using APIs, and so on.
Maybe we should post more runs to Mastodon? The problem is currently I don't have time or energy to post ALL my runs to social media, with all of the details. Something will always be missing.
