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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 ev
by dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
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 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 5y agoMy 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 5y agoMine 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.
- wanderingstan 5y agoNice. 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.
- r-w 5y agoI was just thinking of that! It definitely presents some difficult UI challenges though… May I ask your thoughts on resolving those?