Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

Pony is a messenger without a send button. When you're finished composing a message, instead of sending it right away, you put it in your outbox. Once a day—in the morning (5:30am), afternoon (12:00pm), or evening (6:30pm)—Pony picks up anything that's in your outbox and delivers any new messages that may have arrived. You can edit a message until it's picked up, move it into drafts, or delete it altogether.

I built Pony because email makes it hard to keep up lasting correspondences with people. I think the main reason for this is because email is dominated by "transactional" communication—time-critical messages that are tied to some particular interaction: order confirmations, password resets, etc. All of these things tend to bury interpersonal correspondence. The same goes for texting and chat platforms: they may be good for keeping in touch with people and for making plans, but messages come and go quickly and they're not really spaces designed for more thoughtful correspondence.

Pony, on the other hand, encourages thoughtful communication and acts as a barrier to anything time-sensitive. It's a highly predictable space and unless you've received a delivery, you know that when you open the app, nothing will have changed. And although Pony encourages you to take your time and not communicate reflexively, it also sets a "micro-deadline" every day, which creates structure that helps keep the correspondence going.

I've started a blog, so if you're interested in reading more: https://www.ponymessenger.com/blog/2021-11-15/humans-are-not.... (RSS is available at https://www.ponymessenger.com/feeds/blog.xml.)

If you like this concept, please sign up and try it out! It's available for iOS, Android, and the web. This is a completely self-funded project. You can contribute inside the iOS app using In-app Purchases or in the web app using Braintree/PayPal. You can also buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dmitryminkovsky.

Network effects will definitely be the #1 challenge. I considered integrations—I first tried Pony as an email service, actually. I wanted it to be as accessible as possible. This led to a lot of problems, specifically you get this asymmetry and confusion of some people being on Pony and others being in instant real-time. All of our existing platforms come with norms and expectations, and using a non-instant integration was often perceived as anti-social, which was really unfortunate because I was trying to build something pro-social. You also lose this effect of it being a special place.

Anyway, it is hard to get people on, but fortunately the idea seems to be unique enough and resonate enough with that there's already a seemingly dedicated (albeit small) userbase. It suggests that maybe network effects will be possible to overcome. Everything has to start somewhere!

However, no mention of monetization strategy. Are you selling my personal data? Do you show me ads? Do you intend to sell subscriptions?

Also, no E2E _and_ it's not open source/self-hostable. I need at least one of those. Either I don't need to trust you because things are E2E encrypted, or you establish trust by letting me see and verify code.

> However, no mention of monetization strategy.

Thanks for bringing this up. I was hoping to give a brief introduction and then to field questions.

I will definitely not be selling personal data, or data otherwise. I do have some monetization ideas, and I'm really excited to try them out. They're all going to fit nicely with the core concept of the platform: periodicity. One of them is advertising, and there are others. If I can find good features to sell with subscriptions, I will. The important thing at this point for me is to demonstrate value, and then to monetize without disappointing or alienating users.

> Also, no E2E

Pony is currently a one-person startup and the focus has been on fleshing out the concept, building solid apps for desktop and mobile, and getting those apps into the hands of users. Privacy is something I take incredibly seriously on a deeply personal, ideological level. While I consider myself a really solid full stack developer and believe that Pony's infrastructure is secure, I do not have the requisite experience with cryptography to honestly represent to people that this is a private platform. I hope that with enough traction and some investment, I'll be able to hire an expert to help add privacy features that I can advertise in good faith.

It's common for letters across countries to take >12 or sometimes even >24 hours. It's led people to a lot of meaningful relationships/friendships, they publish some as stories: https://slowly.app/en/story/featured/