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Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

ponymessenger.com

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Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#101

Post by ghaff »

finnh wrote: post #54
ISL wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to edit really is a wonderful feature. I find that I perpetually tweak forum/social media/Slack posts a minute or two after posting, just to improve clarity. The idea of email (even if it carries with it some versioning history) that is editable is really nice. Is there a way to interface Pony with email directly, so that an app isn't required? I can imagine giving ISL@ponymail.com out to people with the…

I am constitutionally unable to proofread before sending, and conversely unable to _not_ proofread after sending. It's bizarre. I wish GMail's "delay send" feature had a much longer maximum time...

Gmail's delay is fairly effective for giving time to catch some typos or remembering you meaant to add another line.

It's not really long enough for deciding, after some thought, that maybe I shouldn't have sent that. (Though I'm pretty good at self-censoring these days.

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#102

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

jerjerjer wrote: post #99

Good idea. Now just to persuade someone to use this too. Super happy you're offering a direct APK download. That's how all android apps should be available.

I'm so glad someone appreciates it :). It's an additional step in my release processes which is currently by hand (not sure how to automate it), but how could I not?

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#103

Post by criddell »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #84
criddell wrote: post #80

This is really cool. What frameworks or technologies is this built on?

Thank you! And thanks for asking! I could go on about this forever :). I started working on this many years ago at this point trying to build the backend with Java/event sourcing[0] and the frontend as an SPA React app. I took the unfortunate/fortunate approach of building a webpage first[1]. I learned a lot from this experience and the result was something that worked okay but was terribly inflexible and difficult t…

Awesome response, thank you!

This is probably a dumb question because I don't have much experience with GraphQL, but how important is GraphQL to your project?

For example, if your client makes the same dozen or so queries day-after-day, would it ever make sense to use that knowledge to write a more static API? There seems to be a lot of text parsing and object serialization and deserialization with GraphQL and it makes me wonder if something more RESTy would be more efficient?

Is computer time and space too inexpensive to worry about these things?

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#104

Post by keppy »

In the past you would boast if your IM software was instant/fast. We all wanted real time everything if only to push the SOTA. But the results aren't ideal; we have slack overload, zoom fatigue, gmail addiction etc. I think there is a trend, now that fast is the baseline, where we will see more software that intentionally gives people space & time to think and reflect.

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#106

Post by abadger9 »

Nice work! I'm building a messenger as well which plays on time dynamics (differently) as side project, your UI is phenomenal. Happy to see a thoughtful take on messenger apps, imo the current model is (1) stale (2) 20-30 years old without any interesting innovations other than emojies/channel organization.

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#107

Post by Shared404 »

mistermann wrote: post #94
Shared404 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the human mind's ability to then use said "insight" to demean others, is also unfortunately ubiquitous.

demean: cause a severe loss in the dignity of and respect for (someone or something). Is it really that bad? It's plausible, but I'm skeptical. Regardless, it is surely suboptimal. I wonder if there are more optimal approaches than "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" (my Mom's advice)....can you think of any?

> Is it really that bad? It's plausible, but I'm skeptical.

Demean was too strong a word, I need to follow my own advice better :).

> Regardless, it is surely suboptimal. I wonder if there are more optimal approaches than "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" (my Mom's advice)....can you think of any?

The three gates[0] are what I try (and admittedly fail miserably) to implement, though not in their original form.

I generally try for "Is it true", "Is it useful", "Is it kind" - in that order of precedence if they can not all be met.

[0] Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#108

Post by hybridtupel »

animal_spirits wrote: post #77
steelbrain wrote: post #10

Thanks for working on this. It reminds me of a social app called Slowly ( https://slowly.app/en/ ) where you write "letters" to people and they are delivered based on the approximate physical distance between them. 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…

While an interesting concept, I think it would be much more meaningful to actually write the letter. Make something physical of yourself and send to someone you care about. It's really fun. I love snail mail

If post cards are also your thing you could also like Postcrossing [0]! There you will sent a post card to a stranger most likely in another country and in turn you will receive one from another person. I like the idea of combining online matching and offline letter sending.

[0] https://www.postcrossing.com/

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#109

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

criddell wrote: post #103
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! And thanks for asking! I could go on about this forever :). I started working on this many years ago at this point trying to build the backend with Java/event sourcing[0] and the frontend as an SPA React app. I took the unfortunate/fortunate approach of building a webpage first[1]. I learned a lot from this experience and the result was something that worked okay but was terribly inflexible and difficult t…

Awesome response, thank you! This is probably a dumb question because I don't have much experience with GraphQL, but how important is GraphQL to your project? For example, if your client makes the same dozen or so queries day-after-day, would it ever make sense to use that knowledge to write a more static API? There seems to be a lot of text parsing and object serialization and deserialization with GraphQL and it mak…

You're welcome! It was a pleasure to share.

I like GraphQL because it aligns with how I think about frontend queries and data. I had spent a bunch of time with technologies like HATEOS that standardize sorta-similar REST-based approaches, but as soon as I saw GraphQL, in my mind it was immediately like: "THIS! This is it." There's just something about it for me. I can't say that that GraphQL is _important_ technologically, I'm sure I could have done it some other way, but it definitely is what has felt the most right of all other things I've tried, and I think that's really important. The front-end clients for GraphQL are also awesome. I've tried Relay and Apollo, and both are excellent. They normalize everything and provide reactive updates when something changes.

> For example, if your client makes the same dozen or so queries day-after-day, would it ever make sense to use that knowledge to write a more static API?

Hasura lets you turn GraphQL queries in REST endpoints! It's pretty amazing. But GraphQL also has this thing called "persisted queries" where instead of sending the queries every time that needs to be parsed, you send a hash for the queries, and the server already knows what the query is and has its representation stored in memory so it can satisfying it w/ the parse step. I can only hope to have to optimize like this :).

> Is computer time and space too inexpensive to worry about these things?

I don't think so... I've just been trying to ship without prematurely optimizing. It's been somewhat of a journey as it is :).

Re: Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

#110

Post by meltedcapacitor »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #8
vorpalhex wrote: post #6

Neat idea. Lovely interface. 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.

Thank you! I really appreciate it. > 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…

Charge $1 (per message) as a penalty for express "courier" delivery.
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