[HN Gopher] Show HN: Pony - a messenger for mindful correspondence
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Show HN: Pony - a messenger for mindful correspondence
Author : dmitryminkovsky
Score : 652 points
Date : 2021-11-19 15:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ponymessenger.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ponymessenger.com)
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| 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).
| passerby1 wrote:
| 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.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| 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.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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?
| hudvin wrote:
| I was thinking about similar service for
| emails/news/forums/social networks. Main idea the same - slow
| updates.
| depingus wrote:
| For news and forum threads you might want to check out
| Fraidycat. Its a browser extension that handles your feeds (rss
| and some others). You can categorize feeds by importance (real-
| time, frequent, occasional, etc) and it updates the main page
| accordingly.
|
| https://fraidyc.at/
| alexk307 wrote:
| Great idea!
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks a lot <3.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| I love the idea and the brand, but that's how I use email anyway
| :).
| elischleifer wrote:
| 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.
| elcomet wrote:
| pony express disappeared in the 1860s...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Very nice.
|
| Can each msg have it's own pickup / delivery time? For example, I
| might want Msg A to Person X be lunch-ish, but B to Y might be
| after work.
|
| An example scenario might be a personal trainer reminding X to
| eat and health lunch, but Y gets an after work nudge to go to the
| guy.
|
| Note: I realize such things could be self-reminders (read: TODO
| app) but there's sonething to be said for hearing from someone
| else and possibly being accountable to them as well.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks a lot!
|
| > Can each msg have it's own pickup / delivery time?
|
| That would really get into the realm of things like Boomerang,
| of which many already exist. Pony is more like "email if it was
| actually electronic mail." The post person comes and delivers
| new things and picks up anything you're sending. I think
| microconfigurability adds a lot to cognitive load, which I am
| trying to minimize.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Understood.
|
| With that said, to your point about overload, I think it's
| worth considering the receiver (not only the sender). That
| is, for example, you want to mitigate my overload. (Thank
| you! :)) And I want to mitigate the strain on my receiver.
|
| Maybe that's still Boomerang? I'll have to check it out. My
| point is, our ideals are very similar when you take a step
| back.
|
| Thanks again.
| Daegalus wrote:
| this is great, solid implementation and very similar to an idea I
| had floating around in my head. glad to see it live. while I
| don't have anyone to message yet, I plan to put this on my social
| media profiles as a contact point.
|
| any concerns about spam? I figure it won't be as bad as most
| services but I still for see people sending spam if it gets even
| moderately popular.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you Deagalus, it's really encouraging to hear that other
| people had been thinking about this as well. I hope this
| implementation doesn't let you down! Please let me know what
| you think and how it can be improved.
|
| Definitely lots of concerns about spam. I've actually been soft
| launching this and have already had spam. And not just spam,
| but harassment, too. All the stuff that comes with an online
| community. After network effects, striking a good balance with
| moderation be a real challenge.
| Pxtl wrote:
| That's a charming idea. I could see how email bridging might be a
| way to achieve network effect, but then email bridging might just
| turn it into another email client.
|
| I'm surprised you took the approach that pickup = delivery. I
| would assume you'd have a lag between them, with only
| cancellation allowed in that gap. Basically "you have N minutes
| to reconsider this thing you wrote, if you've changed your mind
| and want to edit it you have to defer to next pickup".
|
| I would think a "mindful correspondence" system would have an
| enforced gap between composition and delivery to avoid "oops I
| clicked send at 6:29 PM but it's wrong and I need to change it".
|
| I mean, this is based on my experience in email and twitter,
| which you've rightly identified as the opposite of "mindful"
| correspondence (where "submit" and "deliver" are the same
| action), and personal experience with business apps that make
| heavy use of fixed daily jobs (where "submit" and "deliver" are
| the same action at one very specific deadline that everybody is
| rushing to hit).
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| > but then email bridging might just turn it into another email
| client.
|
| Exactly. My first attempt at Pony was an email service. People
| tried it, but there was a lot of confusion about the asymmetry
| of some people being on an instant platform and some people
| being on Pony. Email comes with its own norms and expectations,
| and many people viewed Pony as "rebellious" or "anti-social,"
| which was the last thing I was going for. I am trying to create
| something very pro-social. I decided that my strategy for
| overcoming network effects would be to build a unique,
| excellent product that people loved enough to get other people
| to use it. That's the only way, really, I think.
| bytesandbots wrote:
| I am sure you have thought about this, but following is what
| I imagine it can be:
|
| I can give username@ponymessenger.com email to new people I
| start communication with, like maybe part of a professional
| profile. An email to this address will receive an auto-reply.
| It will explain that message will be delivered later, and not
| instantly. Since this is a different email domain and opens a
| new line of communication, it will not carry an expectation
| of instant emails. It will be even better if this auto-reply
| contains a link to a webpage. On that page, they can modify
| their message or rephrase until the delivery time (with a
| countdown ideally). Maybe the domain name could be something
| that implies the delayed delivery part to make it even
| clearer.
|
| From the recipient/reader side, this has to be a sacred
| space, away from the continuous traffic of other emails. It
| is not possible to turn all of our emails into delayed
| correspondence. Hence, this can not work as just an email
| client. It should help grow the network without becoming an
| email client.
|
| Pony is just the messenger service needed in the ever-
| connected world. I had dreamed of using this kind of
| messenger. Thanks for building it. I hope this grows into
| something big.
| justusthane wrote:
| I'm not at all involved with this, but just based on reading
| the website and reading your comment I think you might have a
| slight misconception of how this works.
|
| There is no send button. You write drafts, and then at the
| pickup/deliver time, Pony picks up all the drafts from your
| outbox, and delivers any mail for you at the same time.
|
| Therefore, you can change your mind about what you've written
| at any point before it gets picked up.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes, but pickup/delivery time is daily/scheduled right?
|
| So if you compose and submit a draft at 10 seconds before
| pickup/delivery time, you have no time to reconsider. That's
| what I'm getting at. I would assume a "no drafts submitted
| before X minutes before pickuup" rule to mandate a minimum
| reconsideration time.
| justusthane wrote:
| I understand what you're saying now, sorry. Personally I
| don't think that's necessary and think it just complicates
| a simple platform.
|
| To me, it seems akin to writing a letter and putting it in
| your mailbox. You can go and retrieve the letter any time
| before the mail carrier picks it up, but after they've
| picked it up it's gone.
| rkagerer wrote:
| How important is the precision of the pickup time?
|
| To extend your analogy, imagine telling the postman "I'm
| just finishing off this letter, could you come back in 5
| minutes?"
|
| Except your postman is very observant, and noticed your
| frantic scribbling as he approached. In a display of
| empathy he gives you a few minutes to finish while he
| goes to grab a coffee.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Honestly I feel like the spirit of this application would
| be "just wait until the next delivery".
|
| Any changes 10 minutes before the deadline? That one will
| wait for the next day. That way you're forced to think
| for at least 10 minutes "do I really want to send this?"
| rkagerer wrote:
| I think the commenter's point is this creates a "danger zone"
| for edits you make immediately prior to pickup. There's no
| time to change your mind and "Undo" them.
|
| Adding a minimum lag (either by adaptively skewing the pickup
| time by a few minutes, or deferring any just-edited drafts to
| the next window) would mean you always have time to think
| about what you wrote.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| 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.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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 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.
| neilalexander wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Now is a really good time to learn. Seriously. libsodium is
| an excellent example of a library which provides user-
| friendly APIs that don't require you to roll your own crypto
| and is very strongly audited by experts -- see
| https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/public-
| key_cryptography/aut... for an illustration. There are lots
| of other similarly good libraries. All you need to do is to
| implement some public key infrastructure, making sure that
| private keys stay private and never leave the user's device
| and that you can look up the published public key of another
| user.
| spacebear wrote:
| Yes! Strongly agree with this. E2E is easier than you think
| and will be much harder to add after the fact.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I just kind of think that encryption is one of those things
| that's best done by people who really know _a lot_ about
| it. Like, I think it 's okay to program if you don't know
| everything about data structures and algorithms, but I _do
| not_ think it 's okay to represent like your app is
| cryptographic secure when you're not extremely experienced
| and well versed in the field. Even if you're not rolling
| your own crypto but using someone else's. The extent to
| while I'm comfortable using someone else's crypto is
| LetsEncrypt with an integration for the K8s nginx ingress
| controller. But I will not personally warrant/represent
| that my at-rest or E2EE solution is sound. I would be
| uncomfortable with that.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Or they could just not do it because it's not that
| important to most people... HN comment sections are not
| representative of the general populace.
| neilalexander wrote:
| Do you know this with reasonable certainty or are you
| assuming this to be the case? Either way, it's arguably
| better to design defensively and build in better security
| than you think you will need up front rather than have
| worse security and be in the headlines for the wrong
| reasons later.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I'm assuming it, and I'm certain my assumption is right.
| 99% of people have no idea what encryption is, so there's
| no way they could care about it. So while I'm not
| "utterly certain", all anyone would have to do to be as
| certain as me is go ask, like, five people who aren't
| engineers about it.
| spacebear wrote:
| I don't think this is true anymore. The average user may
| not know what end-to-end encryption is, but they know
| they don't trust Facebook. And Apple built a whole
| marketing campaign around user privacy.
|
| I think most people do care about privacy, but they're
| usually powerless to defend it.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Yeah I think you are right, more and more people are
| becoming very sensitive to this, and I am, too,
| personally. But as I wrote in a parent comment, I'd
| rather get it right later than wrong now. It's a big
| thing to misrepresent.
| ajkjk wrote:
| The average Facebook user.. does... trust Facebook,
| enough to use it. That's why Facebook is a multi-billion-
| dollar company.
|
| Seriously, sometimes I wonder if people on this site have
| ever interacted with people outside of tech.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Charge $1 (per message) as a penalty for express "courier"
| delivery.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > I do not have the requisite experience with cryptography to
| honestly represent to people that this is a private platform.
|
| Fair. E2E isn't trivial. However, platforms generally need to
| be built privacy focused from the ground up. It's hard to go
| back to a platform and add these things back in.
|
| I would encourage you to add these features early, with the
| appropriate warnings until an audit can happen. "Hey, we're
| trying to keep all your message end-to-end encrypted but we
| haven't had our implementation audited yet. Thanks for being
| an early user!"
| pbourke wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It would be great if this existed as an infrastructure-level
| service. Something like the Signal "API" that allows apps
| like yours to be built on top.
| altantiprocrast wrote:
| It could easily be a modified version of Matrix or XMPP
| (omemo). The protocols, security, and audits are already
| there. Sending delay should be easy to add on top without
| hurting security.
| feanaro wrote:
| What you're describing is exactly what Matrix is aiming to
| be.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Monetization ideas: Fancy "envelopes", "wax
| stamps/monograms/watermarks".
| rp1 wrote:
| Even if the author claimed communication was E2E encrypted,
| you'd still need to trust that they did it properly and weren't
| intentionally siphoning data.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I don't think most developers are malicious. I do think a lot
| of companies, small and large, cut corners and sometimes fail
| to safeguard data well. That's one of the reasons E2E is good
| even when I generally trust the developer - it limits the
| data leaks that can happen in the first place. Marketing
| can't accidentally siphon all user data to a third party via
| analytics sdk, etc etc.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > Are you selling my personal data?
|
| From the FAQ:
|
| > How does Pony protect my privacy?
|
| > We collect and store the minimum amount of data possible. We
| do not sell or share data with any third parties.
| leros wrote:
| I love this idea. I don't practically know how I'd get others to
| use it though.
| pictur wrote:
| The website is really impressive.
| edpichler wrote:
| Great project. I understood the reasoning about the problem he
| wants to solve. Brilliant. I hope it get traction.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you Ed. It really means a lot.
| divbzero wrote:
| Are there email clients that group emails by sender in the same
| way that messaging clients do? I realized recently that an email
| client structured in this way could encourage long-form messaging
| similar to what Pony aims to do, though such an email client
| would still lack the once-a-day dynamic.
|
| Alternatively, Pony could maybe piggyback on email by providing
| an email address that proxies to each Pony account.
| greggh wrote:
| Spike does this. Spikenow dot com.
| MajorSauce wrote:
| Not exactly what you asked for (full email client), but
| DeltaChat is an email client disguised as an instant messaging
| app.
| feanaro wrote:
| 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.
| motoxpro wrote:
| I haven't heard of even one of the things you mentioned
| computershit wrote:
| You should definitely check Matrix out:
| https://matrix.org/docs/guides/getting-involved
| feanaro wrote:
| E2EE = end-to-end encryption
|
| Matrix = an open, federated messaging protocol suitable for
| replication of all kinds of structured data
|
| matrix-rust-sdk is a client SDK for writing Matrix clients,
| written in Rust.
| cvs268 wrote:
| FWIW, I had heard of Matrix, Rust, and E2EE. :-)
| bogidon wrote:
| 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.
| zaik wrote:
| or the Internet Standard XMPP
| malfist wrote:
| I love this thought process. I've gotten into the habit of only
| checking my email at work when I sign in and when I leave for the
| day.
|
| I know you don't integrate with email because of some time
| critical messages, but I wonder if you could still integrate as
| an email/sms app and allow temporary overrides (kinda like how
| pihole let's you pause it for 5 minutes).
|
| That'd be downright awesome
| mistermann wrote:
| > I love this thought process.
|
| And I love this one.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > I love this thought process.
|
| Thank you so much.
|
| > but I wonder if you could still integrate as an email/sms app
| and allow temporary overrides ... like how pihole let's you
| pause it for 5 minutes
|
| I'm leaning towards avoiding that sort of thing. Like how Gmail
| has a "snooze" or how Apple's Screen Time has timers that lock
| you out, etc. That stuff really stresses me out. I tried to
| make this as simple as possible and as "human" as possible, in
| the sense that the human experience--or cognitive processes, or
| biological cycles--plays out on the human timescale, which
| seems to be more like the day or week or year than minutes or
| hours.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I'm retired now but for quite a few years I made it a habit to
| not open my email until lunch time. That way I could work all
| morning, my most energetic time of day, on things that had been
| discussed the day before without being distracted or having a
| bad conscience about not immediately acting on new requests.
|
| Anyone who needed my attention immediately could use the
| telephone and hardly anyone ever did.
| mlangenberg wrote:
| That is also my approach. It takes some courage to do, but
| makes for a much calmer workday.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Me too. Morning work time is much too valuable for noisy
| inefficient stuff like emails and meetings.
| dbuxton wrote:
| I did something a little similar to this with Apps Script to
| deliver my non-urgent email (everything except from a few
| approved senders) once in the morning and once in the evening.
|
| It's only a slight exaggeration to say that it has changed my
| life!
|
| If anyone is interested I'll dig out the code and share.
| ChandSethi wrote:
| This is so wholesome. I like how these new types of tastes on
| traditional messaging keep showing up. Otherwise, all messaging
| apps are some packaging of chat bubbles, video/voice calls, and
| attaching files.
| m1sta_ wrote:
| App isn't working. I tried to login with Facebook and a new
| Xperia phone and it just went back to the login screen.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you so much for reporting. Looks like Facebook revoked
| some permissions! No idea why. Please try logging in with
| another provider in the mean time.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Upon further investigation it looks like both Facebook and
| Google auth on Android are not working--and for different,
| unrelated reasons. My sincerest apologies.
|
| It appears the underlying problem is the volume of traffic
| has tripped something at both of these providers. Google
| actually works, just incredibly slowly. Facebook says I need
| to submit the app for developer review--but I did that a
| while ago and when I go to https://developers.facebook.com it
| says I'm all set... I will try to figure out what's going on.
|
| If you're interested in the app, please create an account
| using a password--you'll be able to add Google/Facebook in
| "Settings" later.
| m1sta_ wrote:
| Not working for new Facebook login via Android (Xperia 5ii)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Alternative: share email over UUCP with your friends, only run
| uucico once a day. You can edit your outgoing mail spool until
| uucico picks it up!
|
| (For bonus modern security and convenience, use NNCP for this;
| possibly have packets delivered by an urchin with a thumb drive.)
| emodendroket wrote:
| Ironically, the post used to come around several times a day.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Yep! From that exact perspective I went back and forth a lot
| trying to figure out whether Pony should support multiple
| deliveries a day. Ultimately I settled on one. I think the post
| used to deliver multiple times a day because instantaneous
| communication wasn't pervasive. Now that everything is
| instantaneous, I decided ultimately that one delivery a day
| would add more value to people's lives by offsetting all that
| instantaneity. It was a tough decision though...
| mistik956 wrote:
| Ok I get it now.
| robotmay wrote:
| I've had this idea knocking about for a while so it's really nice
| to see that I wasn't the only one who thought it might work. This
| looks like a nice implementation - I'm excited to give it a go!
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| That's great to hear. I take it as a good sign that other
| people are thinking about this as well. Would love to hear what
| you think.
| dangerwill wrote:
| This is the first new app idea that has given me joy in at least
| a year :)
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you. That means so much. I've been working on this for a
| while.
| spanktheuser wrote:
| I long for a corporate messaging service that incorporates
| deliberate scheduling. Being forced to choose specific business-
| wide delivery windows, alongside a /discouraged/ urgent option,
| feels as though it would go a long way to ameliorating the
| interrupt-driven messaging culture of most organizations.
| mabub24 wrote:
| What client are you using for messaging/email?
|
| Not that I'm a huge fan of Outlook, but it has a "delayed
| delivery" option that schedules when the emails leave your
| outbox, and an "Urgent" option that highlights the email in the
| receiver's browser. I don't know if I would want those features
| in a messaging/chat app. The whole scheduling aspect seems to
| lend itself to the asynchronous aspects of email. Unless you
| tailor the notifications in your messaging app, everything is
| basically "urgent".
| sflicht wrote:
| I can't be the only one who thinks this idea is terrible. "What
| if we make the product _worse_ , perhaps people will like it
| better?"
| [deleted]
| gaetgu wrote:
| I somewhat agree. I also think that sometimes going backwards
| is exactly what people like. For instance, mechanical keyboards
| are pretty old and largely replaced, but so many people like
| them so much that they are willing to spend a lot of money on
| them.
| sflicht wrote:
| But they are also better. (Just more expensive and/or
| bulkier, i.e. their pros come with some associated cons.)
| Whereas delayed send / batch read only has "advantages" in
| the mind of the user, who could achieve them for himself or
| herself quite easily.
| jasfi wrote:
| Pony seems to try and capture something lost by sending physical
| post. This can technically be done with email, but the mindset is
| different.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I am really glad you think so! That is pretty much the goal.
| tkdc926 wrote:
| Might want to consider a name change. https://www.ponylang.io/
| amunir wrote:
| Wait till he hears about the small horse!
| thih9 wrote:
| I really like the idea; congrats on the launch!
|
| I noticed the In App Purchase names are "Massive", "Generous",
| "Enormous"; I think these are donations (based on your comment in
| this submission), but I wouldn't know that without visiting the
| HN thread. If they're donations, I'd change the In App Purchase
| names to something like "Donation: Massive", etc.
| [deleted]
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Yes--the names are definitely a little... strange. They're
| artifacts from my first submission to the App Store when I
| didn't know how they would appear in the app description, and
| I've left them because getting into a groove with the Apple App
| Store took some time, and I didn't want to do anything to upset
| that.
|
| It's been a really interesting experience, though. The first
| Store review process was confusing and took a few days. But
| lately it's been quite smooth. This last version (2.1.7) was
| reviewed and accepted in under an hour. And in the middle of a
| weekday. If it stays this smooth, I might be inclined to try
| and rename the IAPs :).
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| This is really cool. What frameworks or technologies is this
| built on?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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 to work with. (The
| other problem was that it was an email service, but that 's a
| whole other matter).
|
| I realized that if I wanted people to use this, I needed to
| have mobile apps and I needed to have a server-rendered
| frontend, at least the public facing pages. So for my second
| attempt (which is what you see here, a standalone messaging
| platform), I did the right thing and transitioned to
| Postgres/Hasura for the backend (with a NodeJS-based API that
| fills it out). On the front-end, for the web, I transitioned to
| NextJS which is wonderful. Eventually I transitioned entirely
| to TypeScript, and my stack if entirely typed from DB schema to
| UI. It's just great. I was able to do something like transition
| serial int identifiers to UUIDs in two hours without
| introducing a single bug anywhere in the stack.
|
| Since I had started with a webapp, I was able to build the
| mobile apps out of the same frontend codebase by wrapping the
| core of the webapp in an SPA that is delivered with Capacitor,
| which is also pretty excellent. Building a nice mobile
| experience with web technologies proved very difficult, but I
| think I did a pretty good job with it. But it is really, really
| nice having one, single codebase for the web and mobile.
|
| In addition to the tools I've already mentioned, I'd like to
| make a couple shoutouts to these indispensable libraries and
| the people behind them:
|
| - ProseMirror -- a rich text editor. Thank you Marijn!
|
| - Framer Motion -- an animation library for React. Thank you
| Matt!
|
| - Apollo Client -- a JavaScript GraphQL client. Not as robust
| as Relay in some ways, but actually better in my opinion
| (having spent a lot of time with Relay). Thank you Ben and the
| entire team!
|
| (You can get a complete list of frontend libraries by clicking
| "Credits" in the footer on the homepage or in the menu inside
| the app.)
|
| Edit:
|
| I almost forgot: the backend is running on GKE. Kubernetes
| hosted by other people is a wonderful thing! This morning I
| woke up, ran: gcloud container clusters
| resize cluster1 --node-pool default-pool --num-nodes 3
|
| Tweaked some resource requirements in my a couple YAML files,
| ran helm upgrade prod .
|
| And here we are! There was a post on here the other day about
| how the hermit developer is dead but that post was very wrong,
| and I am living proof :). One person can do so much in 2021
| with all the tools we have. (That said, I would _love_ to work
| with other people on this.)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702975
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18824993
| motoxpro wrote:
| Hasura is incredible! So happy to see you using it :)
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| It's a game-changer... I love it.
| criddell wrote:
| 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?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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 :).
| criddell wrote:
| Thanks again. I didn't know about persisted queries but
| that sounds exactly like the answer to my question.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| You're welcome! A small correction: I shouldn't have said
| that "GraphQL has persisted queries"--they're not part of
| the spec or something. Just something many tools
| allow/enable.
|
| And by the way, in 2021, I wouldn't write a GraphQL
| backend by hand. I think a tool like Hasura/Postgraphile
| is the way to go. They put up excellent scaffolds that
| you can augment. In addition Hasura (I don't know about
| other tools) provides an access control layer that is
| really nice as well.
| criddell wrote:
| Funny you should mention access control. One of the
| stumbling blocks for me when I did a bit of GraphQL work
| was adhering to the best practices listed here:
| https://graphql.org/learn/authorization/
|
| That says authorization should not be in the resolver but
| putting it elsewhere often resulted in much more
| complicated code. It makes sense if GraphQL is coexisting
| with REST or other end points because they could all
| share the same authentication code, but for pure GraphQL
| projects it seems arbitrary.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Yes those docs bewildered me a bit as well. I never got
| too far with all of that or building a GraphQL server in
| JS for that matter. The authorization/access control in
| Hasura is game changing.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Oh and how could I have forgot XState! Pony would not be
| possible without XState. Thank you davidkpiano Andarist et
| al.
| steelbrain wrote:
| 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/featured/
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I hadn't seen Slowly. That's awesome--thanks for sharing. I
| really like how it's tied to physical distance. I really want
| to add more delivery modes, with geographical distance being
| one possible factor.
|
| For me a big deal is not just the slow delivery, but the
| inability to instantly send as well. The presence of a send
| button has this effect of making me send things that aren't
| ready. I don't intend Pony to encourage people to edit and edit
| and edit forever, but I've found in my personal usage that
| sometimes I write a message, put it in my outbox, and then some
| number of hours later I'll think of something randomly and edit
| it a bit. Or I'll change my mind and delete it.
| ISL wrote:
| 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
| clear expectation that my SLA for a reply is 24-48 hours
| instead of instantaneous _and_ that my SLA for _their_
| correspondence is also similar.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Sorry for the slow response!
|
| I also tweak a bit after posting, and that Pony helps with
| that. I don't usually edit and edit forever, but it helps
| me get the message how I want it.
|
| > Is there a way to interface Pony with email directly, so
| that an app isn't required?
|
| Right now there is not, and I'm not sure it makes sense to
| add one. The first version of Pony was actually an email
| service, because I wanted it to be as accessible and useful
| as possible. It turned out that because email comes with
| its own set of norms and expectations, many people
| perceived the email version of Pony to be anti-social if
| not even borderline hostile. It was pretty disappointing
| because I wanted to make something that was _pro_ -social.
| With everyone on Pony, everyone is on board and the
| expectations are totally clear.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| It drives me crazy when people post in Slack and then often
| edit their message after sending. Just edit and then send.
| Otherwise people will have to basically ignore your first
| message and try to remember to check back in a couple
| minutes when you are done editing...
| myself248 wrote:
| I wonder if you could write some sort of filter that
| would let you, as a reader, not see messages right when
| they arrive. Maybe let them "fade in", and only show up
| as unread when they've solidified a little while.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's what the typing indicator is for. Just type, edit,
| then send
| finnh wrote:
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I also identify with this 100%. It's probably a
| personality flaw of some sort.
| andai wrote:
| I think some buffer in the brain gets cleared when you
| send the message, and you see it with fresh eyes.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Wow. That is exactly my experience but I've never been
| able to articulate it that way. "Constitutionally
| unable." Thank you.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Random thought. Try replacing the "send" action in your
| brain with "stand up". For me I think "send" is almost a
| knee jerk reaction, almost a fidget respond where the
| monkey brain doesn't like to sit still so it will do the
| action it sees next. So maybe "stand up" could be an
| action that satisfies monkey brain while also buying you
| time to reflect and transition mental states to a
| reviewing mindset.
| jarnagin wrote:
| One of the remarkable things (in the context of this age)
| about reading history is that you see just how many people
| used to write letters in heated moments and then choose not
| to send them once they'd cooled down. The histories of
| presidents are littered with such moments, and I often
| juxtapose that fact with social media. How often has the
| ability to send something instantly allowed each of us to
| expose our worst self to people?
| jedimastert wrote:
| I remember this a few years ago...I should get back into it.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| No, you won't go back into it!
|
| If you remember it, and used it a few years ago, but then
| forgot about it until some random HN post mentioned it, it's
| not something with persistent utility (addiction) to you.
|
| EDIT: I see I got understood in a way I didn't intend to.
|
| Didn't want to say anything about parent, just pointing out
| that mentioned platform itself lack addictiveness to be
| considered a good (successful) social network.
|
| Or is this one of the "feel good, we all should be using it"
| kind of stuff, where people force themselves to use it,
| because it's "right thing to do", but it feels more like a
| chore than joy, something like gym.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I'm in a _very_ different place than I was a few years ago.
| e40 wrote:
| I know this is the innernets, but I always get a kick out
| of responses like the GP's. Wow.
| mistermann wrote:
| The human mind's ability to see into the future based on
| sparse data is a fascinating phenomenon, and fairly
| ubiquitous.
| LocalH wrote:
| The human mind's ability to incorrectly apply that
| foresight to _others_ is equally ubiquitous, however.
| mistermann wrote:
| Hmmmm, not sure I understand?
| Shared404 wrote:
| And the human mind's ability to then use said "insight"
| to demean others, is also unfortunately ubiquitous.
| mistermann wrote:
| _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?
| Shared404 wrote:
| > 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| I like it.
|
| I would evaluate it thusly:
|
| a) Is it true?
|
| I would say: overwhelmingly.
|
| b) Is it necessary?
|
| In an absolute sense: no.
|
| In a relative sense (say, if one has a specific goal in
| mind): Certainly maybe, but I would predict: Extremely
| Likely.
|
| > Is it kind.
|
| I suspect not. But then, I think HN'ers can have thick
| skin when required (say, if you are trying to optimize
| The System that we all live within).
| Shared404 wrote:
| > persistent utility (addiction)
|
| That's... not a good definition of persistent utility.
|
| My pantry has quite a lot of persistent utility, but I'm
| _reasonably_ sure I 'm not addicted to it.
|
| Edit:
|
| >Didn't want to say anything about parent,
|
| I apologize for my misreading.
|
| >just pointing out that mentioned platform itself lack
| addictiveness to be considered a good (successful) social
| network.
|
| I think that depends on the definition of successful. I
| quite like the idea of calm technology. I think it's
| possible to have a non-addictive social network which lets
| you socialize without feeling compelled to use it.
|
| It wouldn't be for everyone, but wouldn't be for no one.
|
| >Or is this one of the "feel good, we all should be using
| it" kind of stuff, where people force themselves to use it,
| because it's "right thing to do", but it feels more like a
| chore than joy, something like gym.
|
| I don't think so. And it's possible to have something that
| is both - exercise, writing, sometimes reading fall into
| that category for me. Many things worth doing are not
| _easy_ but far more rewarding and worthwhile in the long
| run.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>feels more like a chore than joy, something like gym.
|
| If going to the gym feels more like a chore than a joy,
| then you may be doing it wrong, or inconsistently (some
| good coaching may help).
| animal_spirits wrote:
| 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
| hybridtupel wrote:
| 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/
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I definitely agree in many ways, but a core goal in creating
| this app was to meet people (including myself) where they
| are, which today is on our phones and computers.
| matheist wrote:
| Maybe delivery could be optionally executed through the
| mail! i.e. the _writing_ experience happens through the app
| but then the recipient gets a paper letter. No idea if
| people would go for that or if it 'd be worth the extra
| complexity.
| [deleted]
| nikolay wrote:
| Slowly is totally different and I won't use it. Not sure why it
| has usernames, when there are no public profiles. I won't use
| Slowly as I can't have my username of choice. But I will use
| Pony.
| ronaldj wrote:
| I discovered Slowly just over a month ago. Really surprised
| about the lack of spam and the interactions I've had.
| yumraj wrote:
| Few thoughts/comments:
|
| - I like the overall idea and execution seems great. It's even
| free so you're reducing a lot of friction, great job.
|
| - My gut reaction is that except in very few settings, once a day
| delivery is going to be problematic. Perhaps a once an hour, or
| once every 2-3 hours delivery could be supported. Unfortunately
| that will defeat the entire purpose, so am not really sure. I
| guess you'll have to just wait and watch how it's being adopted
| and adjust if needed.
|
| - Not sure how the backend works, but if you're pooling all
| requests for delivery at the same time you will have very high
| peaks with mostly idle time in between. Am curious how you are
| adjusting for that? AWS Lambda??
|
| - 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. A lot of people may like
| reading/drafting emails at quiet times, periodically say every 2
| hours. Again, this is not inline with the original intent of
| this, so not suggesting you change anything just something to
| keep in mind depending on the traction you get.
|
| All the best!!
| floatingatoll wrote:
| 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.
|
| For content of that nature, once a day is well beyond what's
| expected of the postal service. About the fastest you can
| exchange letters with someone by post is one week round trip,
| assuming a letter and a reply.
|
| It is also well-proven that humanity is able to maintain human
| connection and relationships using mailed postal letters, so
| once a day is certainly no barrier in that regard.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A fun anecdote:
|
| My grandmother says that before telephones, she used to
| make plans by post! At that time there were 4-5 postal
| deliveries per day, so she could exchange messages with
| friends while at work to make arrangements for that
| evening.
|
| Bu I agree that it's nice to have that separation. I think
| email used to provide that long-form channel, but it's too
| swamped by transactional rubbish these days.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| That is an awesome story.
| yumraj wrote:
| > At that time there were 4-5 postal deliveries per day,
|
| This was in the US? Urban or Rural area? Very curious
| since I've only seen once a day deliveries, between 2
| countries I've lived in.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| My instinct is to go the other way: for communication with
| old friends, I'd enjoy a once-a-week or even once-a-month
| pace. I approximate that rhythm with many friends now, but
| there's always a worry that I'll drop the ball when life gets
| busy.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Mine too! That's what my user experience with this thus far
| has let me to believe, too. I am thinking of creating a way
| to specify the delivery settings per-thread, such that
| messages on some threads take 3 days to deliver, or 7 days,
| or 14. You could have multiple threads with the same
| people, with different delivery durations. A core goal is
| to keep correspondence alive and one of the best ways to do
| that is to make sure enough time elapses so that there's
| something new to write.
| r-w wrote:
| I was just thinking of that! It definitely presents some
| difficult UI challenges though... May I ask your thoughts
| on resolving those?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Nice.
|
| Yes, and these friends also have my phone and email, so
| they know how to reach me for time sensitive stuff. Good
| to have a channel that is for deeper and slower
| connection.
| gotostatement wrote:
| I think it's a really cool idea but you have a network effect
| issue. I would expect it to be hard to get enough of my friends
| on it for it to be useful. Integrations with existing message
| apps and environments would be ideal, though I'm not exactly sure
| how that would look.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| It's very simple - just open your email client once per day.
| 100 % a same thing, with an existing network, using a tool you
| already have.
|
| That's what I do anyway :).
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| This works for some people, but I've found that this requires
| a level of self-discipline that a lot of people (including
| myself) don't have.
|
| And more fundamentally, I'd say there's a difference because
| Pony changes not just how you personally receive messages but
| also the kind of messages that people send to you. Having
| that extra time and structure, and knowing that your
| correspondent does too, can make a qualitative difference.
| dexterdog wrote:
| It's not the same when the recipient is not bought into the
| same delayed concept.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| Building such a thing as a Matrix client might be an
| interesting concept. Interesting idea tho.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Hey thanks a lot.
|
| 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!
| grenoire wrote:
| Wouldn't that be solvable by assigning a Pony-managed reply-
| to address? That way Pony can still manage how it sends back
| the replies to you.
|
| I really like email as a comms platform and think that it
| could greatly benefit Pony.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think the point is you'd get a barrage of ill-thought-
| out/ephemeral/chatty messages all at once in the day, which
| is maybe worse than being spread out, and certainly not the
| 'mindful correspondence' goal.
| webwanderings wrote:
| It's a novel idea, and you're correct to keep it out of
| integration.
|
| Assume, for a moment, that your idea takes off and becomes
| the next WhatsApp. People, you know, will find ways to return
| to their normal selves. They'll cram a ton of links and
| messages into their allotted time slots.
|
| What you're attempting to address is a fundamental flaw in
| human nature. Many people are aware of the issue and are
| taking precautions in their daily communication. Many,
| however, do not.
| ISL wrote:
| Even if the link/message-cramming takes place, it provides
| a useful impediment to the sender and a bulwark for the
| recipient.
|
| A wall of text/messages from a relative is more-readily
| handled in a healthy fashion when it doesn't arrive
| piecemeal.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > and you're correct to keep it out of integration.
|
| Thank you for your support in this. It's a constant
| exercise in discipline to keep focused in this direction.
|
| > They'll cram a ton of links and messages into their
| allotted time slots.
|
| I'm not sure people will be inclined to put links and
| ephemera in here. At least not most people. I do, to some
| extent, especially when I want to avoid starting a text
| back-and-forth, but I think instant messaging is a good
| place for that kind of thing and I suspect it'll stay that
| way.
| airstrike wrote:
| Now I feel like building a small device powered by raspberry
| pi or something similar that lets one send and receive
| ponymail thrice a day so that I have a separate device /
| activity that is markedly different from simply checking my
| phone
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's also the "issue" of people most likely also have other
| types of communications with the same people they'll have on
| Pony. Means that you could get in a situation where most of
| their messages will still come in on other channels, and the
| all the mindfulness will quickly be lost.
|
| It's a great idea, but without uninstalling other messaging
| clients the goal of a mindful messaging life seem impossible.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Yeah that's definitely been the case in my experience as
| well! Some people just send me texts--and that's fine, that's
| how they want to communicate with me. But other people have
| embraced Pony and we use it all the time, mostly for things
| that don't benefit from being sent instantly. I've found that
| some people "get it" and some people do not. Pony doesn't fix
| all your other messaging but it creates an opportunity to
| have mindful correspondence online that you don't otherwise
| have.
| keppy wrote:
| 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.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Isn't that interesting! It's like we all just take it for
| granted what "tech" means and something is not "tech" if it
| doesn't fit those parameters. For me it was some time around
| when Viber came out that I was like "wow, do we really need so
| many of the same messenger?" It makes sense because
| instantaneity was really revolutionary from a human historical
| perspective, but as you say, now that we have this baseline, I
| hope people become more receptive to exploring technology
| that's designed for usability and not technological novelty
| that isn't even novel anymore...
| rekoros wrote:
| 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 :-)
| glenneroo wrote:
| You might enjoy https://www.futureme.org (there are others as
| well I see, but I think they were the first). I've used it with
| a few friends and myself over the last ~15 years - usually in
| 1-5 year increments. Whenever I receive an email, I make sure
| to type out a response over the next few days and send it off
| to be received in x years. It has always been a nice surprise
| receiving a "diary" entry from myself in the past, especially
| when I make note of current affairs... particularly in the
| future, past problems always seem so insignificant... and it's
| always surprising how often many of my plans were completely
| thwarted.
|
| edit: pro-tip: type it out using your favorite editor in case
| your browser crashes or something!
| rekoros wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| I guess this can now be done with Gmail/Superhuman/Boomerang
| "send later" feature as well.
| glenneroo wrote:
| 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 would hope they can
| continue running long into the future, whereas some of
| these other services are at the whims (gmail excluded) of
| survival against a multitude of competing services and
| being able to continue running long into the future. A lot
| changes in 5 years - it feels like a lot of services from
| 15 years ago don't even exist anymore. Oh and a nice bonus
| for some people - you can allow your emails to be shown
| publicly (and anonymously ;)
| kroolik wrote:
| > 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
| glenneroo wrote:
| 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! :)
| thuruv wrote:
| 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?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you rekoros! More delivery modes is something I am really
| excited to explore, especially slower ones. I think
| pickup/delivery should always remain once a day, but you could
| specify that on a given thread, messages take 3 days or 7 days,
| etc, to deliver. I've noticed that in my own usage of Pony,
| this would be pretty nice because sometimes it is the passage
| of time that makes a correspondence exciting and helps there be
| something new to say.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Right I was about to suggest exactly the same thing. You
| could even agree with a friend (invite a friend) to have a
| thread checked, say, once every two months. So there'd be a
| bit of guilt if you didn't leave anything, but that potential
| for guilt is the cost the two of you would pay for keeping in
| touch.
| charles_f wrote:
| Love the idea, I'm so annoyed by receiving train of thoughts over
| 10 messages, their corresponding notifications and a 15m
| timespan.
| mro_name wrote:
| wonderful
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you :))
| mro_name wrote:
| recently came across thoughts on the contemplative nature of
| telecommunication in http://viznut.fi/texts-
| en/permacomputing.html
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225)
| allenu wrote:
| 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 be delivered just once every hour or every half hour.
| It might reduce the distraction of constant emails or messages.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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?
| toshk wrote:
| Awesome, problem is to convince everyone to use pony. Would be
| great to move this to for instance browser extensions for slack,
| gmail, and if techincally possible whatsapp.
|
| At least my sending can get scheduled. And maybe also
| autoresponders.
|
| Wont be exactly the same.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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 :).
| toshk wrote:
| Love your enthusiasm :).
|
| Okay from a different angle. Im sure you have thought about
| this:
|
| My point was referring to the challenge of moving people away
| from their existing communication platforms.
|
| So I wrote down some quick ideas how to move your philosophy
| which many of us clearly appreciated to our current workflow.
|
| Convincing individuals to your product is something you are
| clearly succeeding in, but for many of us to convince our
| social circles to move your product won't be so easy to do.
|
| At least I, and maybe more of us would love this feature in
| Gmail or whatever e-mail client they are using.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks :). I am definitely enthusiastic. That's the only
| way.
|
| And for sure, it's hard to change behavior in general. It's
| been hard for me--and I made this product. Sometimes I send
| a message to someone and I'm like: "Why did I sent that
| instantly?" But I've been improving.
|
| For Pony to be successful at some kind of scale, there will
| need to be "influencers" (aka "leaders"?) who help makes
| this someone of a culturally relevant movement. Finding
| those people and getting them on board will be a big focus
| of my marketing effort.
|
| Would be interesting to see a Google implementation...
| toshk wrote:
| Current communication platforms are so massive (sms,
| whatsapp, e-mail, messenger etc.) that it feels like such
| a huge fight to get some form of network effect, that's
| why I was thinking of a way of integrating with them
| instead of creating a completely alternative channel. But
| it might be possible in some niches/ influencers way.
|
| Anyway to better clarify my initial comment. There are
| chrome extensions, allowing you to schedule emails at
| certain times. You could do a similar things were you
| extend chrome with an extension for Pony Gmail, where you
| send email on the pony time scheduled. The sending part
| is solvable.
|
| Receiving however, 2 problems: - Organise receiving; not
| sure if it can be done, but probably its somehow possible
| to create a service that saves all incoming meessages and
| then once a day serves it to a seperate inbox
|
| - Senders probably sometimes need sn autoresponder,
| that's a problem already solved.
|
| Anyway, just brainstorming out loud. Wish you all the
| best.
| roeles wrote:
| 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.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| The concept reminds me of my friend's service, Kermpany E-Mail:
|
| https://e-mail.kermpany.com/
| andy0x2a wrote:
| This is a really cool idea.
|
| I'm wondering what your approach to scalability is, as it seems
| like you're going to have large bursts of traffic every half hour
| ( with certain hours having much more traffic depending on
| demographics).
|
| If this messenger takes off, how are you going to deal with say
| for example all of India having their messages deliver all at
| once in the evening?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you! I've been wondering this too. It would be a great
| problem to have. As a sibling commenter writes,
| telemetry+selective scaling would probably be okay? Otherwise
| some other creative approaches like "pre-delivering" messages.
| pbourke wrote:
| With a bit of telemetry, you'd know in advance what your load
| is going to look like, allowing you to scale up or down
| resources (if you design the system that way)
| nikolay wrote:
| This reminds me of ShortMail.com, but somewhat better. Congrats
| on the launch! Let us know how we can get verified (like you)!
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks you nikolay. The verification process is to be
| determined. I just wanted to make sure there was a method to
| distinguish "official" communication at launch. Not sure how
| useful, but we'll see :).
| yitchelle wrote:
| Could you just turn off the notifications on your messenging
| apps?
|
| That is what I do for all messenging apps except for SMS. I would
| check them in my downtime in the evening.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| That's a great question--thank you for asking.
|
| In my view, turning off notifications (or using something like
| iOS 15's "Focus" feature), though superficially in the same
| sphere of concerns, is actually an orthogonal concern. The
| purpose of Pony not just to limit distractions, but to create a
| space that naturally keeps out transactional (security codes,
| shipping alerts) or low-effort (tweets, funny pictures)
| messages. These messages are usually time-sensitive and often
| fun and enjoyable, but they also have a tendency to bury
| messages you may need some time to think about. So while I
| enjoy getting links and pictures from friends, I've always
| wanted a space that's on a more "human" timescale--that is, a
| space that isn't instant but more attuned to our non-instant
| cognitive processes. Turning off notifications kinda, sorta
| gets you there, but not really.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I tried that with FB Messenger, but forgot to check for months,
| missing important messages.
| r_singh wrote:
| Cool concept, wonder which user segment would be passionate
| enough for the app to overcome the challenges posed by network
| effects...
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| It's interesting... I've spoken with a few avid users, and they
| just seem to be people who enjoy writing and thinking. Usually
| such "seed" users have gotten one or two other people on who
| also enjoy corresponding in this fashion, and it's worked out
| well for them.
|
| I frame he product as "mindful" because it's an well-
| applicable, widely-understood word, but to my surprise I've not
| had much traction with the mindfulness community in terms of
| people who actually use it. But my sample size should be bigger
| to really get a good feel for the demographics.
|
| And thank you :).
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I really wish we had a unified messenger (that collects messages
| from Email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.) with this feature.
| Would be so amazing.
| depingus wrote:
| Matrix has bridges for a lot of other services.
|
| https://matrix.org/bridges/
|
| Some are in better states than others, and most will have
| trade-offs when it come to stickers and media. But definitely
| worth a look.
| locallost wrote:
| It's very smooth to use, or at least to onboard. Did not try to
| actually send a message yet, but will try soon. That brings me a
| bit to maybe my first issue: not really sure how to use it since
| nobody I know uses it yet. I'd be ok with some way of people to
| discover me, at least in this early stage where nobody is
| spamming :-). Also, if I get some people to try it, I'm pretty
| sure some will raise questions about the privacy of messages, who
| gets to read them etc. so you might want to look into that (yes,
| I know it applies to pretty much everything else also).
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you, that's really good to hear.
|
| > not really sure how to use it since nobody I know uses it
| yet. I'd be ok with some way of people to discover me
|
| Yeah I haven't been sure what to do about that except having
| people naturally invite other people and connect that way. What
| are other ways for people to discover each other? I'm reluctant
| to have people upload contacts, for example.
|
| > I'm pretty sure some will raise questions about the privacy
| of messages,
|
| Yes, adding at-rest encryption and exploring other options as
| well is a top priority.
| procinct wrote:
| Maybe give people a place to post a small bio of themselves
| on some sort of virtual pin board so users looking for a pen
| pal like relationship can get in contact?
| spoonjim wrote:
| 15 years ago I worked for a company that only delivered internal
| mail once an hour. Was a really good system that I've never seen
| anywhere else.
| mcbishop wrote:
| My significant other is my only Telegram contact -- used only for
| urgent stuff. We used email for non-urgent communication, but I
| didn't like having our one-on-one writing mixed with all the
| outside noise. We just switched to Pony for the non-urgent stuff.
| I anticipate her being my only Pony contact.
|
| Anyway, I'm stoked to have Pony. Thanks!
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| That's awesome to hear. It's truly an honor. I'd love to hear
| how it goes. Please don't hesitate to report any problems.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm not sure I could rewire myself to do this but I love the
| idea.
|
| I wake up in the morning and read my postcards from friends.
| Write a few during the day. They get "mailed" out that night.
|
| I just need to find some friends who don't just want to chat all
| day.
|
| Is there potential for a bridge between worlds? I'm on WhatsApp
| with a bunch of friends. One of which will read our entire group
| thread once per day and provide an itemized single message
| response paragraphs long. I love her style. But the problem is
| that WhatsApp is complete junk for long form.
| Cyphase wrote:
| As an aside, do you know if your friend is replying like that
| on WhatsApp mobile, or WhatsApp Web on a larger screen?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Mobile.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > I'm not sure I could rewire myself to do this but I love the
| idea.
|
| Like anything behavior-related, it takes some time and effort.
| I created this because I've wanted this going on two decades,
| have used it for the better part of 6 months, and I still
| sometimes send things to on text/chat/email that could have
| been sent by Pony. But I do it less and less and it's been
| rewarding.
|
| > Is there potential for a bridge between worlds?
|
| I'm not sure... I am looking forward to hearing about people's
| experiences and what they think.
|
| > One of which will read our entire group thread once per day
| and provide an itemized single message response paragraphs
| long. I love her style. But the problem is that WhatsApp is
| complete junk for long form.
|
| She may be your go-to candidate for trying this out! I've found
| that people who successfully adopt Pony have at least one
| person who's willing to try it with them. I was even thinking
| of making that a prerequisite for signing up, a gimmick of
| sorts, that you need to sign up with someone else. My
| experience has also been that all these platforms--WhatsApp,
| email, chat (obviously)--aren't great for long form. Stuff just
| gets lost and buried before you respond to it, and the UIs
| aren't built for that. If you know someone who seems interested
| in that sort of communication, you might want to try it with
| them! Would love to know how it goes.
| godot wrote:
| The idea/term of "Outbox" really reminds me of email of the old
| days (in the 90s) where you have a desktop email client (e.g.
| Eudora, or Internet Mail and News, or even earlier versions of
| Outlook Express) that don't do auto-sends, and only connect to
| your POP3/SMTP servers when you click Send and Receive. This was
| probably due to internet being on dial-up and being billed by the
| minutes was common so users limited their internet time (e.g.
| disconnect from internet if writing a long email response, etc.).
| I have a lot of nostalgia from those days vs the always-on
| culture now.
|
| I like that you were able to spot this particular usage pattern
| as something to narrow in on for your product. I don't know if
| this would catch on as a trend (for example, like ephemeral
| messaging did when Snap came out), but I wish you all the best!
| darkwater wrote:
| > This was probably due to internet being on dial-up and being
| billed by the minutes was common so users limited their
| internet time (e.g. disconnect from internet if writing a long
| email response, etc.).
|
| You can remove the "probably", it was exactly for that. Most
| often then not you would write offline, send the email (which
| would go in the "outbox") and then later on you would
| eventually connect to the Internet and send/receive emails.
| sigg3 wrote:
| Because hitting that send and receive could prompt a five
| minute wait, essentially blocking other uses of the OS.
| mro_name wrote:
| 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.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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.
| mro_name wrote:
| > 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.
| drodil wrote:
| I wish there was such feature in Outlook. Any way to do a plugin
| for that with this idea? :)
| carreau wrote:
| What the best/recognizable way to advertise the someone can write
| to me using pony. Can there be like
| ponyto://myusername@ponymessenger.com ?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thank you, that's a good question. I've been trying to figure
| that out. The URI scheme is not something that has occurred to
| me, but that seems like a pretty good idea--at least for tech
| people. Otherwise, maybe a QR code, or at least getting into
| services like Linktree, so that logo and concept becomes
| recognizable. Am I missing anything else?
| carreau wrote:
| It's unclear to me. It's also hard to have something
| recognizable, but a even just a dynamic URL on the main
| website: https://www.ponymessenger.com/contactme/<username>
| where a user can have an easy to customize message, or even a
| pre-done one "Hi I'm using pony for my inbox, you can send me
| a message using pony by doing XXX,". That way in slides,
| mails, ... I can just put "contact me at URL".
|
| Maybe also a mail server bridge ? If So write to
| <user>@ponymessenger.com it reply with "You message will be
| once a day, you can edit and cancel, by clicking this link".
| [deleted]
| abadger9 wrote:
| 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.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks you! I worked on this for a long time and hearing that
| means a ton.
|
| > the current model is (1) stale (2) 20-30 years old without
| any interesting innovations other than emojies/channel
| organization.
|
| Yeah that's the most fascinating thing! Honestly I kept waiting
| for amounted to almost two decades for someone to build Pony
| before I built it. It never made sense that just because the
| medium of transmissions (the Internet) is instant, all
| applications built on top of that medium had to be instant,
| too! I mean, how many instant apps do we need? So I made Pony,
| because instantaneity is what really stood out to me as a
| factor that if modified could make a big difference in
| usability and experience.
|
| Would love to hear about the time dynamics you're working with
| if you can share.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| One suggestion from my side is to add a delivery at 12:00AM. This
| will help to create a unique long form communication on special
| occasion days (birthday, wedding day, graduation) that is not
| achievable in other messengers. This can be a unique value of
| Pony that can help with customer uptake.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| My mom wishes my happy birthday at 8am, not at 12am. YMMV, but
| 12am timed posts are a dead giveaway of robotic/impersonal. I
| also don't want my morning newspaper delivered at 12am at
| night, rather than 6am at morning. So I think that the
| constrained times chosen are appropriately selected.
| foodstances wrote:
| You've reinvented UUCP
| panzagl wrote:
| Earlier in the week we had discussions on how various social
| networks were just replacements for finger, so maybe he's on to
| something.
| causasui wrote:
| Someone once told me the key to a successful startup is to
| pick a protocol of one of the well-known ports and bring it
| to the browser.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| "FidoNet experience" :)
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| :)) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlXNXdf6Xh0
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Hello HN!
|
| 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.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Looks really great but E2EE is important to me.
|
| Also this:
|
| > data is not encrypted at rest [0]
|
| I realise this is a one-person startup, but personally I would
| want more focus around privacy and security for a new messaging
| app. It's going to be a key requirement for a lot of people I
| think.
|
| Being a one person startup, this is even more important, as the
| "company" behind this is likely not to have the same level of
| security measures that a larger company would have (I know this
| is an assumption but it's a reasonable one).
|
| I absolutely love the concept and the execution so far looks
| great. We do need a messaging app like this!
|
| [0] https://www.ponymessenger.com/privacy
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Thanks so much. Sorry for the slow reply!
|
| I'm sorry this doesn't have at-rest encryption, much-less E2EE.
| I totally understand. As I wrote elsewhere, the best I can do
| is be transparent about that. I'm a solid fullstack dev, but it
| would be dishonest to represent to people that I can
| cryptographically secure their information against a
| sophisticated adversary. I hope that Pony grows such that I can
| retain or hire a reputable expert who may be able to assist
| with that, so that I could market encryption in good faith.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but it doesn't take much
| cryptographic know-how to at least enable encryption at the
| database level. Just something to think about...
|
| Good luck!
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