Took my wife out for a run tonight, and ran past a guy coming the other way.

Saw him a couple of times on our loop, but thought nothing of it.

Uploaded my run, and somehow it states I ran with him? I don’t know the guy, and don’t even follow him on Strava.. And if I look at his run tonight it’s completely different to mine.

Anyone ideas? 🙄

Cross paths enough and you trip the algorithm as to being in the same place

Anyway…

…you were running???

Did a ride with a mate. 40 miles. Both uploaded to Strava. No mention of riding together. Did a short 20 mile stretch with him and our individual and longer rides were linked.
Strava is weird.

Sometimes I get flybys when I’ve seen nobody. There’s a guy who rides to work on a track half a mile from me, the otherside of a railway, and even though I never see him he is recorded as a flyby. We live in a cul de sac!

What I find amusing about the flyby algorithm is that it’s only 99% sure I’ve ridden with myself!

I think there’s a zone, not sure if time or distance, around the points on your ride so someone riding on a parallel street who you never see gets added to the list. I did a ride and didn’t “see” anyone but Strava had about a dozen riders who had at some time been close enough to trigger the algorithm.

definitely, I guess even more so in wooded paths/trails where you may only be 10′ apart tops, but on completely different paths at different angles.

This comes under Group Activities in the privacy settings. Though doesn’t appear you can turn it off, but you can limit people seeing the group activity to friends only, rather than public in general. You can set Flybys to private though which stops others seeing you in flybys but will also prevent you seeing flybys on your activity.

That will explain why I sometimes cannot see the routes my flybys have taken.
Not that I’m being nosey but sometimes I get ideas of where to ride just by seeing where others have been. Picking their brains!!!

That will explain why I sometimes cannot see the routes my flybys have taken.

Think its fairly new and fortunately not overly used. Since, for the same reasons as you, I have found it useful in finding new places/routes.

I think there’s a zone, not sure if time or distance, around the points on your ride so someone riding on a parallel street who you never see gets added to the list.

Its both time and distance (the little table has values for both).
It is a bit odd though and seems to have a fairly wide margin for distance. I get runners appearing on “fly by” when I am kayaking and they are about 50-100m away. Although that said some have inaccurate gps since they would be swimming instead.
Similarly there is one segment near me where I was surprised at a)how many people rode it and b)how many were amazingly fast. I have no illusions about my ability but the difference in speeds indicated that for some reason a couple of thousand really good riders decided to ride a whilst not bad in itself it is really isolated with crap around it segment. Looking at a random sample they were all on the road about 10-20 metres away.