How to Post on Strava Without Revealing Your Privacy
You’d think Strava would already have such a feature, given how long it’s been around, but no: Strava just added the ability to send private messages to other users, and you should now see the feature in the Android and iOS apps.
Strava says it wants to give athletes a “efficient way to coordinate adventures, get inspiration or advice, share your journey and more” with new messaging features, so if you’re already chatting with a group of Strava friends in another chat app, you’ll now You may want to consider switching to it.
Messaging on Strava supports both individual and group chats, and you can share activities and routes. Features such as reacting to messages are included, but other chat features such as photo uploading will be added later.
How to start a conversation
You have several different options for messaging your Strava friends right within the app. Perhaps the easiest way is to open the profile of the person you want to talk to and click the “Message” button on their page to start a one-on-one conversation. Chat is also now visible in the sharing settings for activities, events, and routes.
There’s also a new speech bubble icon at the top of the Home and Groups tabs, and you can tap it to jump to your conversation list. Open an existing chat from here or start a new one using the Compose button (top right) – select more than one recipient and Strava will start a group chat for you.
Chatting is quite simple: enter your message and click the orange “Submit” button. The only real additional feature worth talking about is the ability to save routes with people you chat with, and this is done using the icon to the left of the text entry field.
You can bring up a few more options by long-pressing a message you’ve sent or received. Reactions to posts appear here, and if it’s your own post, you have the option to edit or delete it. From the same pop-up menu, you can also reply to individual messages to make the thread easier to understand, or copy messages (useful if they contain addresses or phone numbers, for example).
Tap the gear icon in the top right corner of a conversation to turn off chat notifications if it gets too busy. If you’re in a group chat, here you’ll find options to rename the group and manage its members, and you can give other members the ability to invite more people.
Returning to the main conversation list, there’s another feature worth mentioning: swiping left on a conversation will reveal the trash can icon, which will allow you to permanently delete the thread. It’s a pretty basic messaging app, at least for now, but of course its key selling point is that it’s built right into Strava.
Message privacy settings
It is currently not possible to message random people on Strava. Even if you turn on messaging, only people you follow will be able to communicate with you, so you won’t receive spam. (Well, unless one of your friends has had their Strava account hacked.)
For security reasons, you can’t use messaging at all unless you’ve entered your date of birth into your Strava account. What’s more, sharing activity in Strava chats respects existing privacy settings: for example, no one can suddenly post one of your private activities in their group chat.
To set your message privacy level, go to your conversation list using the speech bubble icon at the top of the Home or Groups tab. Tap the gear icon in the top right corner and you can learn more about how messaging works on Strava, as well as customize how you want messaging to work on your account.
You can choose: “Follow ” (anyone you follow can send you messages), “Mutual messages ” (people can only message you if you follow each other) and “No one” (no one can send you messages, but you can initiate chats with other people if your privacy level allows). ). By default (at least on my account) Mutuals will be selected for you.
As far as I can tell from Strava messaging testing, changing your privacy level doesn’t affect conversations you’ve already started, so if you decide to switch to the No One option, it won’t get rid of existing chats. in your mailbox.
The messaging service has not yet appeared on the Strava website, and there is no indication yet whether it will ever appear. You also can’t change the privacy level of messages on Strava on the web, so everything is controlled from within the app, but you can see and manage the people you follow on Strava in your browser.