I deleted my Strava account – What Now?

3 months ago 3

For a while now I’ve been looking for an alternative to Strava because I don’t feel comfortable anymore sharing my location publicly. I don’t remember why it was good idea anyway back when I started using Strava many years ago. As you may know, I’ve deleted most of my other social media accounts. But Strava was little bit different because I want to keep all the data I’ve collected during all these years and keep using all the statistics, like how much I’ve ridden my different bikes etc.

I’ve been self hosting things on my own home server for a while so I started looking for self hosted alternative to Strava. I found Fittrackee, which claims to be simple activity tracker. I tested it for a while, but it was too simple and missing some features, like the ability to differentiate different bikes. So that’s why I didn’t see it as an alternative to Strava. While testing it I didn’t figure out an easy way to import my activity files from my bike computer to Fittrackee, so I was just importing from Strava via a shell script, automated by a cron job. But later I figured out a way which might have worked for me. But I had already moved on to the next alternative to test.

Then I found Geo Activity Playground (let’s call it GAP, it’s easier to type 😄 ). It’s a software which can be run locally to view recorded outdoor activities stored on your computer. You can just run it on your computer, but you can also run it with Docker on your home server. That’s what I decided to do. It shows similar information and statistics like Strava, Veloviewer or Statshunters, but all data is stored locally. It even includes Explorer Tiles feature, so I can continue with tile hunting.

So far GAP is looking good enough so that I decided to delete my Strava account and continue with GAP instead. Though this is just a small one person open source project so there’s still some bugs here and there. But the developer is active and fixing bugs regularily.

How to import from Wahoo to GAP?

GAP can sync from Strava, but if you don’t want to do that, you can just import your activity files to GAP. You can use the web UI to import one file at a time via a browser, or you can store all your activities in a folder and let GAP to scan that folder. You can create a folder structure so that there’s a folder for each activity type and inside of those folders a one folder for each equipment. So then if I want to import a ride I’ve done with my Azub Max, I would put the file from my Wahoo bike computer to folder: Playground/Ride/Azub Max/. GAP can then extract the metadata of activity type and equipment used from the file path and the name of the activity from the file name.

That’s all straight forward, but my folder where I’m supposed to put the files is located on my home server. How can I get the files from my bike computer to the correct folder?

I happen to have a personal Nextcloud instance running on the same network (on a different server, though), which makes this little bit easier. I created a SMB share on my home network and put the activities folder in that. Then for Nextcloud there’s a plugin which allows to mount a network drive to Nextcloud. So I mounted that activities folder from that SMB share to Nextcloud. Now after a ride I hit Done on my Wahoo Elmnt Bolt and the activity is saved to Wahoo app on my phone. Then on the Wahoo app I select the newly created activity and select share .fit file and save it to Nextcloud in that activities folder. Then I just configure the GAP to use that activity folder inside the SMB share as it’s data folder. That’s it.

This solution won’t probably work for most of you reading this, because I’m pretty sure most people don’t have home server running in their closet with personal Nextcloud instance. But that’s what I have, so this is the easiest way I could figure out to transfer activity files from my Wahoo bike computer. Though it’s still not automated like Wahoo’s Strava integration.

Here’s few more screenshots of GAP to give you some idea what it does and how it looks like. But remember, this is in active development so things will probably change and there will probably be new features in the future.

You don’t need to run this on a server. You can easily just run it on your laptop. And I think this kind of is meant to be run like that. But anyway if you are interested about this Geo Activity Playground, go check the official documentation on how to install it on your own computer. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as your regular software, but it can be done.

So now you can no more follow my rides on Strava. But I do sometimes post photos and details of my rides to my other social media. You can find the links here.

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