When we get Komooted

I like to remind those I mentor that The Company’s sole goal for their employment is to extract more value from them than they are paid - not because The Company is evil, but because that’s just what’s required in a capitalist endeavor. But, what it does mean, is that you shouldn’t feel like you owe any company anything - the goal of any for-profit corporation is to extract more value from you than they give back to you, period.

At the same time we can maaaaaaaybe start pushing back on all of the "capitalism is not the problem" and "capitalism is the least worst of all available options" memes?

Or is it too soon already?

> it was a mission and purpose

Is this "we are a family here" for the people that don't fall anymore for the "family" con?

This is half right IMO. I'd agree with the first part of the article: when you have a growth-at-all-costs company, which is then sold to someone who wants to control costs to crank out the maximum profit, then users are inevitably going to lose out. It was always entirely predictable that this was the way Komoot would go - lots of us commented way before the Bending Spoons acquisition that 250 salaries (never mind the influencers) was a lot to pay from a routing app.

But even as someone pretty left/liberal fully signed up to the open source gospel, I think the conclusion is unconvicing and rather handwavy:

> Promising projects such as the Mastodon social network, Matrix chat, and Pixelfed social photo sharing are reviving the diversity and abundance of the early, independent internet before it was enclosed by tech giants in the 2010s. More than singular platforms, the Fediverse represents a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons.

No. You don't get performant consumer-level routing without lots of fast servers, and the Fediverse doesn't really have a way to pay for lots of fast servers. Ok, you can run hobbyist projects like Brouter on low-spec hardware - and don't get me wrong, Brouter is absolutely awesome in its own way, and for a certain type of cyclist it's all they'll ever need. But if you want something that appeals beyond the hardcore cyclist - in the way that Komoot does, and in the way that Google and Apple Maps do for motoring (and, increasingly, city cycling) - there has to be some sort of way of paying for the servers. "Open protocols and distributed services" don't fix that.

Entirely personally (and you would expect me to say this), my view is instead: support your local artisan. Your local artisan framebuilder will build you a fantastic bike. Your local artisan bike shop will repair it much better than a chain like Halfords will (or whatever your country's equivalent is). These guys aren't practising "enshittification". They're doing what they love, and being paid for it so that they can feed the family and pay the mortgage. Sure, maybe it's still "capital", but not in the same way that Bending Spoons does it.

So if you're happy going to an artisan bike shop, consider going to an artisan routing/mapping site, rather than a growth-then-sellout project. There are plenty of these - I'm obviously going to plug my own site/app, cycle.travel, but there are many others.

(Incidentally, I hold no brief to support Komoot - quite the opposite, because they've ripped off a bunch of my content - but the bit about "leeching off the open-source commons" is not entirely fair. Komoot developed one of the most popular OpenStreetMap geocoders, Photon, and released it as open source. They're paid-up members of the OSM Foundation. Sure, there's more they could do and some other companies do more, but it's important to recognise what they have done.)

Yes. Equity is ownership. Basically:

A for-profit company, owned by a few founders, takes your data and provides no data licensing terms or contractual guarantees. It’s legally speaking their data. Everyone else has basically no legal rights to anything on the ”platform”.

Then they attract both employees and users due to their good mission, ”we will never sell”. Surprise! They sell and leave everyone hanging.

From a EU perspective I get it. This is upsetting and surprising even. But from a US perspective this is just business as usual.

That privately owned data is a pile of gold that grew by the day, eventually big enough to buy out even the most passionate and stubborn founders. The company was never what the author expected it was, even before the sale – it was a projection of what they wanted it to be.

I applaud the efforts to fix the business model and lack of data sovereignty. The more people that ”wake up” and understand the flaws of current system, the better chances we can fix it.