Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence

As someone who lived with the pony express this brings back memories :)

I like this micro-blogging distribution concept. It's like a micro substack distribution.

As someone who generally abhors social networking, I like anything that has substance and limits spam.

Not working for new Facebook login via Android (Xperia 5ii)

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and kind words yumraj. My thoughts:

> once a day delivery is going to be problematic. Perhaps a once an hour, or once every 2-3 hours delivery could be supported.

I've gone back and forth on this many times myself. To the point where the backend actually does support two deliveries already :). It's been a really tough call! Ultimately I decided to double down on sticking to the unique value proposition that this offers. I don't mean to sound too self serious but although this app tweaks one little parameter (instantaneity) the result is pretty dramatic. Lessening the impact of that result, as you observe, would defeat the point. I think traction/adoption will involve the people intuitively "get it" right away using it (fortunately such people do exist, which has been a really nice affirmation for me), and helping spread and explain the concept.

> requests for delivery at the same time you will have very high peaks with mostly idle time in between.

The infrastructure is described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29280539, but essentially I have not optimized yet for peaks etc. This will be a great problem to have, and should be solvable with telemetry, scaling, "pre-delivery" etc.

> How about delivering the messages via email over SMTP, so that this becomes an email client and takes care of having person at the other end also having Pony.

The first iteration of Pony was an email service. It turned out that breaking the cardinal rule of "Don't Fix Email" was, indeed, a bad idea. I didn't even try to properly launch it, because the very first piece of feedback I got was about how "wonderfully rebellious" Pony was—which was pretty sad for me because the last thing I wanted was for Pony to be perceived as anti-social by people. I wanted to make a platform that was pro-social. It turned out that established platforms like email have their own set of norms and expectations, and trying to unilaterally violate those norms is a big social no-no. That's why this version is a self-contained platform. It's less accessible, but with all parties on the platform, all the expectations are really clear.

> There is one setting where once a day delivery is beyond acceptable: Any time you would be willing to send a written letter by postal mail.

Yep, that is a good heuristic!

I think it could be generalized by saying that anything that isn't time-bound or time-sensitive (i.e. making plans) is fine for once-daily delivery. Everything that is time-sensitive or perhaps just quick and low-effort should be kept in the instant realm, because that's why the Internet got so huge in the first place. The only problem was that absolutely everything became instant and no non-instant ways to communicate online were left, thereby making it pretty hard to have correspondence like people used to correspond. Which is the problem Pony tries to address.

Yes, that will definitely be the big challenge. I don't think we will convince everyone. Not everyone wants or needs the type of interpersonal connection that Pony is designed to support. But I think that's okay: my bet is that enough people will appreciate having the Pony option to have made it worthwhile to have built. I wanted it anyway... :)

This isn't meant to replace instant communication, but to augment instant communication.

It will definitely take a lot of communicating and explaining and showing value to people who don't get it right away. And that's fine! That's what makes this a business endeavor :).