Naturally we think of social media as being social but since the pandemic, and before then social media have become about keeping influencers happy and everyone scrolling, rather than chatting and engaging. It’s the utilitarian "We’re using social media to distract ourselves, rather than network.
I posted a photo to Instagram and noticed just two likes. In contrast almost every one of my runs, hikes, and runs, gets 20 or more kudos. The paradox is that Instagram and Facebook were networks of friends, and friends of friends. They were networks of people I knew and engaged with online and in person every day.
Now, Facebook is dead. Instagram is dead. Strava is vibrant.
The elegance is that it’s offline to online, rather than vice versa. I meet people in the physical world, cycle and run with them, and then add them online. The online community makes offline meetings persistant, rather than ethereal. I might never meet them again but we’re still seeing each others’ riding habits and routes.
Due to my early adopter status, and early social network habits I let others add me, and then I add them. I rarely add people first because my vision of “social” networks is different. It comes from the 90s. I don’t have the COVIDIAN attitude to “social” “media”. I wrote it this way because I think that IG, FB, Threads and others are no longer social. they’re exploitative.
That’s why Strava shines. Do I like using a US based site? No. Do I like that it has venture capital and that it is floated on the stock market, or will be? No. What I like is, that, for now, it connects people from the “real” world into an online community, and makes meeting others, almost daily, easy. That’s what Twitter, and Threads, and Facebook and more should do.
I noticed that OechsnerSport have a group for Nyon, Geneva, Lausanne and others. I noticed that Decathlon has one as well. This helps to illustrate the pivot that I’m happy to see. We’ve gone from a sparse community of geeks connecting online to meet like-minded people, to normal people meeting offline, and re-connecting online, either to find a group to be active with, or that they have been active with.
To use another term, I believe that Strava and similar sites or apps have become the third space. The first is home, the second is work, and the third is Cheers, or Strava. That third space is a group on an app and we meet regularly.
For the Skimmers
There was a time, when social networks had to be big, to be relevant, but that age is gone. Now social networks have enough people locally, not to need to be global. There are three or four cycling groups in Nyon, and many more around the Léman. There are several running groups too. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and Threads, and Instagram, became irrelevant because they don’t connect us anymore. Strava does. Meetup does.