# slowpals: a penpals site idea

i really like discussing various ideas. i especially like when people challenge my views since that means i can sharpen my arguments or perhaps change my views.

however doing this in an online discussion forum is quite exhausting. if you post something dumb in a public space, then you get lot of responses, some of them mean even. it's infeasible and pointless to respond to everyone. even if you do, you might still get another barrage of responses to any of your replies.

one solution to this is to avoid public discussions. private discussions are often more fruitful because you have more time and energy to focus on really understanding that single person's perspective. you'll be more likely be able to stand in their shoes if this other person is open to invest the energy to make this happen.

for online discussions i believe plain text emails is a good way to discuss. this means what you need is a good penpal finding site rather than a forum. since one doesn't really want to reveal their email address nilly-willy, ideally the platform would allow exchanging messages through itself. however even with penpal sites, it's very likely that you send a letter to someone, and then you don't get any feedback or response to your letter, and then you don't know if you were rude, or if your partner just lacks the energy to respond. ideally there would be something that incentivizes users to respond.

so here's an idea for a penpal site that i think could be quite trivial to implement, and requires almost no resources even. this would an online platform that could easily scale up to millions of users and still be operated from a small raspberry pi because you could outsource many of its operations to free online services. i'd totally implement it myself if i knew of a couple folks that would sign up.

it would consist of two parts: a static online site that lists all the profiles along with the profile data; and an email address through which one can interact with the platform.

the static online site would be a plaintext document (hosted on e.g. github) that just lists the usernames and their profile text. i wouldn't bother with profile pics and whatnot, plaintext should be enough.

then i'd have an email address, e.g. slowpals at gmail, and the users have to register and talk to others through that address. e.g. an user wishing to register could send an email to slowpals+admin at gmail with a title "register <usename>" and with their profile text as the body. then a script would process this email and upload their profile to that online site above. (in emails everything after + is ignored, so you can use that for such tricks.)

now comes the interesting part: exchanging messages. suppose alice notices and likes bob's profile. she can start a conversation by sending an email to slowpals+bob at gmail. slowpals will then forward the email to bob's private address. however there are three important rules that would make this interesting.

• oneaday rule: you can send and receive a single message per day.
• replyfirst rule: you can't send or receive another message until you responded to your most recently received message.
• onethread rule: you can only have one active thread by person.

my goal here is to artificially "slow down" conversations in the hopes that they remain more civilized this way. rather than delivering all the messages at send time, slowpals would queue them up, and deliver them one at a time. each user would have a first in first out queue. so if charlie also sends a message to bob, bob will receive the message from charlie only the next day after he responded to alice. and bob can expect a response from alice: the only way to not receive one is if alice decides to not use the site anymore. alice will not have access to the rest of the members until she responded to bob's email. this also ensures that one doesn't get a barrage of emails. one can expect that on this site one only receives a few messages, and that one will never be overwhelmed by them. in fact, this platform degrades gracefully: if you stop responding, slowpals will stop nagging you, it's as if you simply deactivated your account and i'd even delete your profile from the public listing if you didn't respond to an email for a month.

there's one point to note: there should be a way to end conversations so that they don't go forever for no good reason. it should be possible to annotate messages for which you don't expect a reply. the same way it should be possible to report spam messages. i'm thinking of using the first line of message for optional directives. e.g. for a message like this (involving slowpals+alice and slowpals+bob):

  !noreply

  hi alice! it was nice chatting with you! cheers!

alice wouldn't be expected to respond. she would get this email and the next day she would get another one regardless if she responded or not. that day she can start a new conversation with another member instead.

note that the oneaday rule makes it hard to start new conversations when your queue is not empty. i think this can be considered a feature rather than a bug. you should make the most of your existing conversations and you should respond promptly. most people are quite lazy when it comes to emails, so eventually your queue would drop to zero, which would also allow you to start new threads.

the slowness might be annoying when you start to like the other person. however in that situation you can exchange your real email address and you can have your discussions in real time.

and it would be quite easy to implement this site since the email queues would be stored in gmail. all i need is a daily cronjob that processes these emails and forwards the messages according to the above rules. and after i forwarded a message, i can simply delete it from gmail. it's quite nice from the user data perspective, since i only need to store queued emails. the only sensitive data that needs to be carefully maintained is the password to this gmail address and the username to email address mapping.

to keep this simple, i'd probably also enforce a plaintext rule: if you send an email with html or with attachments, i'd just simply reject your email. i'd limit the message size to 100k too. and i'd highly encourage people to strip the previous message from the body since i really don't see the value of that in this context.

with such rules i'd totally try participating in such a community. i don't think anybody reads this blog but if you do and you like the idea of such a penpal site then let me know. then i might be motivated enough to build it. or if you know that such a site already exists, then also let me know, i might sign up.

published on 2020-12-02

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