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0 pointslonelyasacloud8mo ago0 comments

RideWithGPS. No affiliation with them, but have been paying for service for years. Far less glitzy than Komoot/Strava and far less paid advertising, but for my money it's better for route planning - particularly long distance off-road - than anything else I've come across [0].

[0] a) For instance Komoot's exports for GPS head units were not accurate enough to be as helpful with picking/finding faint/overgrown trails b) RWGPS UI makes it a bit easier to work with OpenStreetMap's inaccuracies. c) Its auto routing seems to consistently work a bit better than Google's if I want to ride on a roads where car drivers are less likely to try and kill me. (not sure how well Strava does this)

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microtonal8mo ago

paying for service for years

Isn't this the main point of the article? The community feeds such a service with knowledge and in the users and up paying a lot for the all the knowledge they contributed themselves (possibly after an acquisition, leaving the original philosophy behind). The article mentions https://wanderer.to/, which leads to a community-owned data set.

Of course, some new federated service is most likely going to have a subpar user experience, but we will never get there if we are only feeding into semi-closed ecosystems.

sorenjan8mo ago

Fun fact about Strava's routing, they don't support ferries, something most other alternatives like RWGPS do. They've been asked for years to support it, just as they've been asked for more than a decade to support multi sport activities, but they don't seem to care. When I was a paying Strava customer I still used RWGPS for routes.

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