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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

#221

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

allenu wrote: post #218

Very cool idea! I love the idea of a "pony express" kind of daily pickup. It's very easy to grok the idea. In some ways, it reminds me of back in the day with BBSes and FidoNet long-distance mail distribution happening early in the morning to avoid high long-distance charges. Did you play around with different frequencies for distribution? I've always thought it would be great if the messaging we used at work could b…

Thanks a lot! Yeah, people seem to be comparing it to FIDO, which is really cool.

I haven't played with different frequencies at all, but I really want to. Do you have anything in mind?

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

#223

Post by thuruv »

rekoros wrote: post #175

Very nice! Many years ago I lived in a house without a phone - the only meaningful way to communicate with faraway friends was sending and receiving paper letters via post. In many ways, that cadence was a great way to maintain relationships over many years, with minimal mental overhead. Maybe Pony should send/receive messages once a week/month, instead of daily :-)

I don't know if I'm falling here into the pun. !!

Instead of delivering a message once a month/ week you could make the conversation/reply once a month. The key here is to skip the transactional nature of the conversations that are happening around us. Because of the availability of IMs we tend to write back to back questions/texts and waiting only seconds to get a reply. Instead, I liked the letter format where we realise what we have I'm hand and composed it in a thoughtful way. Right?

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

#224

Post by mro_name »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #189
mro_name wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your nick hints you fancy waiting. I like that. But humans are herd animals after all and long to keep in touch with the herd. All the time. Like the borg. Even more so, if addiction is exploitable. You hear me, facebok. Indeed 1x day may be much healthier, but prbly too adult to catch.

You're totally right and tapping into the herd dynamic is really the only way to get substantial movement to happen with anything. That's why culture and society is so focused on leadership, right? My hope is that I will be able to get "influencer"-type people to help lead the way. Without that, people will continue moving in their current direction. But with leaders, I think adoption of anything is possible.

> so focused on leadership, right?

indeed, and repetition as a lever of the leaders. Repetition makes people believe anything plus forgetting it's a belief.

If you hear 'mooo' all day long, you better behave like a cow. You'll be treated like one anyway. That's nothing to think about. Mental firmware does that.

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

#225

Post by kroolik »

glenneroo wrote: post #186
rekoros wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I guess this can now be done with Gmail/Superhuman/Boomerang "send later" feature as well.

Nice, I never even knew that existed with gmail! Probably because I never use gmail's native interface. Won't the messages always show up in gmail's draft folder though? That would eliminate a big part of the surprise ;) I particularly like that FutureMe is a service solely dedicated to the task of sending an email in 1/3/5 years. I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years i.e.…

> I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years

Not necessarily ;) IMHO what matters is their actual traffic. For each user they are going to send an email in the future. If they have 10 daily users, then that's 10 emails in let's say a year. Those users are daily, so a year after their acquisition they will send 10 emails/day, everyday.

Where I'm getting to is the delay doesn't matter much long-term, because they will eventually need to send all those emails whilst serving new users. It's all about their user base, not delay.

Obviously, their use case might simply be what limits daily active users thus the "usage loan" to pay back in the future :D

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

#226

Post by roeles »

What a great idea! I currently have my smartphone offline for the majority of the time (you can call me for urgent stuff), and enable WiFi to achieve the same sort of effect.

This is much better I think, because it removes control. I sometimes still have the urge to check often for responses.

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

#227

Post by zaik »

bogidon wrote: post #181
feanaro wrote: post #26

If you made this a Matrix client, I think you'd really have something. Using the matrix-rust-sdk, you could even get E2EE that people are requesting for free.

Big plus one. In order to encourage (what I strongly believe to be much needed) experimentation with personal messaging we have to break away from having each. new. client. establish it's own network. Otherwise competition in this field will always be limited. Matrix I believe is currently the most promising answer to this problem.

or the Internet Standard XMPP

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

#229

Post by glenneroo »

kroolik wrote: post #225
glenneroo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, I never even knew that existed with gmail! Probably because I never use gmail's native interface. Won't the messages always show up in gmail's draft folder though? That would eliminate a big part of the surprise ;) I particularly like that FutureMe is a service solely dedicated to the task of sending an email in 1/3/5 years. I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years i.e.…

> I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years Not necessarily ;) IMHO what matters is their actual traffic. For each user they are going to send an email in the future. If they have 10 daily users, then that's 10 emails in let's say a year. Those users are daily, so a year after their acquisition they will send 10 emails/day, everyday. Where I'm getting to is the delay doesn't m…

Good points. OTOH they don't allow attachments and text can be compressed pretty well, plus I somehow doubt most people are sending new messages daily or even monthly. The friends I use it with all write one or two emails to each recipient to be delivered in x years, where recipients won't even know about the existence thereof until x years later. We then tend to reply to each of those messages once after receiving. I personally try to write 3 messages to myself for delivery in 1, 3, and 5 years... the longer the delay, the greater the level of retrospective silliness. Overall I think there isn't a lot of traffic and it's such an obscure service, every person I've mentioned it to has never even heard of it.

It sure would be interesting to see some stats though! :)

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

#230

Post by passerby1 »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #182

This concept for a forum could be interesting. I sometimes write thoughtful replies to HN submissions many hours later, after ruminating, but HN has moved on to the next new thing. (It is a "news" site after all).

I catch myself recent years of trying to propose a forum for communications at company or for my startup project. However I stop myself after 1-2 tries many years ago because I feel like team won't accept it. Maybe I'm a fatalist, but feels like some (often younger than me) people want instant communication, instant result, instant reward. In everything. Probably it's good, not sure. But a Forum concept does not fit into that world, unfortunately.
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