Komoot was one of the best mapping services to create bike routes, specifically in Europe it was the choice but then Komoot sold out on the ideals the company founders claimed to hold dear opting to put millions of dollars in the their pockets. Is this is a surprise?

Nope.

In fact it’s the playbook for most of the world online today and it’s called enshittification. We don’t own the movies we buy anymore, we gave a company some money for them to graciously allow us to watch a movie until they don’t feel like letting us watch it anymore.

It doesn’t have to be this way though, we can own things again.

Owning Media

I own music by purchasing CDs or digital downloads directly from artists then loading them into my own server and playing my own private streaming service through Roon. You don’t have to use Roon and pay them though, you could use navidrome and not give any company your money for music.

I own my movies by purchasing Bluray discs and then putting them on my server to be parsed by Jellyfin. We watch them with inFuse across our various devices.

I own my books by purchasing physical copies of them, or purchasing non-DRM copies of digital books and storing them on my server. I’ll email them to my children’s Kindle and load them manually onto my Kobo¹.

Things I Don’t Own

Currently I don’t really own my data for cycling routes. I never used Komoot because it’s not the best for Canada, but there is no reason Ride with GPS wouldn’t go the same way and mess with my hand crafted and ridden cycling routes around Prince George. This could be fixed by using wanderer which would let me own the routes and where they are published.

In fact sitting here looking around my office I think the only thing I don’t own is my workout data. It gets synced into Garmin or Zwift and then into Strava. The file format is standard though so there is no reason I couldn’t find a way to keep all my data to myself and out of the hands of technology companies, whom I pay for the gracious use of their services.

How much of your data do you own?

1. Kobo is compatible with Canadian libraries ↩︎