Formal – Interruption free communication | Hacker News Reader

Formal – Interruption free communication

formalapp.com

159 pointsgkr116 comments

The non-immediacy of messaging was one of the things I loved so much about FidoNet. A few times a day, your node (BBS) would dial into a hub server somewhere (sometimes over a long distance phone call) and download the mail bundle. The more messages you got, the longer it would take, so there was always some excitement when the bundle was large. You'd read your mail with care--after all, you might get 2-3 private messages a day--and responded with care. Normally, you'd just let your messages get delivered during the next daily mail call but if you had something important to send, you could initiate one manually. If you were sending internationally and didn't mind spending a little coin, it was fun to mark your message as "direct" and watch your node dial up the recipient's node across the pond or the world.

It was remarkable technology for the savvy home computer user in 1989.

I miss those days of running a local point for my own mail. I enjoyed connecting with the local and remote communities - it was basically a form of one-to-one and group letter writing.

Although at one point a misconfigured node was calling my home number multiple times during the middle of the night. That part wasn't fun!.

I agree, FidoNet was a wonderful technology. My local BBS also had access to several newsgroups that were synced nightly. Between the two, I had plenty of material to keep my young mind busy. Perhaps too much material (some of the alt. newsgroups were probably not best for a ~9 year old :))

In 1989 I had to walk down to the lab to use a terminal to check my messages and this effectively limited my email checking to 1-2 days per week. Those ... might not have been the days actually. But there were some high points.

In the 1980s, I tried to send an email to someone outside IBM. It was hard enough sending to another employee. There was some massive rigmarole and in the end I think I gave up and write a letter.

FidoNET was greatly efficient in a time of limited connectivity. I find I often schedule emails. Even wrote a plugin for my ticketing system that scheduled emails to maintain a sustainable flow of interactions with one client and not burying them in emails. Can't wait to it to be reinvented like slack brought out a modern IRC client. What would today's FidoNET look like if there was little to no internet available?

When I was 12 I was the hub for FidoNet mail in my smallish town. I was tweaking the settings before heading on vacation. We left the next morning, and returned a week later. We came home to an official notice from the police to contact them immediately. My parents did, and pretty soon 2 police officers showed up at our door.

They wanted to know who had been "hacking" from the second line in the house. It turns out I forgot to enter the area code for the FidoNet long distance number, and some poor souls had been getting a phone call at 3am with "strange noises", which auto-dialed every minute for 3 hours straight.

The police had disconnected the line, and I had to spend an hour explaining to the police officers what a BBS is, and what FidoNet is. I remember trying to draw a diagram, but it was in vain. In the end they just left confused, reconnected the line and I promised to be more careful in future.

I had a similar experience as a kid. We had a second phone line as my parents were both occasionally on call. Because they were just on call and the phone company charged extra, we didn't have the 'tone dialing' feature on the line. When they weren't on call, I was able to use that line for BBS's and Compuserve.

It turns out that at least for US-Robotics pulse dialing is not an exact science. The BBS I used most frequently was often busy so I would turn the modem volume down and just wait for it to eventually connect.

One day my parents got a call from the police who had gotten complaints of persistent prank phone calls late at night. I realized the problem and that I had to admit to staying up way past my bedtime online, I don't recall what the police threatened but I was definitely scared. I gave them a list of the top few BBS #s I called, and one of them was one digit off.

I got off pretty easy, I think I just paid for 'tone dialing' on that line going forward.

Tone dialing was such a crack-up. My grandmother refused to pay for it and it was always such a pain in the ass placing calls from her house. What was so funny is that the phone company had already transitioned to digital switches so somebody actually had to configure that line to intentionally not interpret the DTMF. If you didn't pay the $3 or whatever a month for tone service, they would have to create a burden for you.

That seems very nice of the police, both ways, Where and when was this?

It was nice of them, but I honestly think they just didn't know what to do. It was 1991 in Fort McMurray, Canada.

My preference was UUCP for USENET via 1200 baud modem circa 1983.

I don't know if this is possible, but I would love this as a layer above existing messaging platforms.

For instance, I just want my iPhone to batch my notifications until a certain time, without me having to worry about becoming distracted.

I want just 20-30 minutes of unhindered communication (real-time as well), and then go back to the batch-mode.

I am currently doing this with "Cellular Data Off", but it's a bit annoying when I want to listen to music without being distracted. I want the data, but not the notifications. Right now, as a time-consuming hack, I manually turn off all messaging notifications.

A very important aspect of life, and a step in the right direction. But does not seem like a worthy replacement just yet.

One thing I do with my iPhone that helps is turning off lock screen display for the most distracting notifications.

iOS will then batch these notifications and show them when you unlock your phone next. It's not perfect, but it prevents stuff like a Snapchat or a Twitter @mention from totally distracting me while I'm at my desk.

Those types of notifications should be disabled entirely IMO. I don't think people realize how stressful those notifications are relative to their actual value.

I unfollowed everyone on Facebook so I don't have a news feed. I am detached from news. Focusing on my work and local family and community seems far healthier. I've realized that worrying about everything going on in the world, including trivial details about my acquaintances, is a recipe for disaster.

> I am detached from news

You are..here. You mean you are detached from the BS of your friends? That sounds a lot more reasonable.

No, I mean I'm not letting news affect my mood unless it is truly significant. I still check the news (trying to reduce) but not getting worked up about things as much.

I did the same, basically, by quitting Facebook. Technically, I didn't quit it, just deleted the app from my phone. I was a daily poster and habitual feed browser and commenter but I stopped cold-turkey. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to do it but I did and it turned out so much better than expected. Stress level is way down. Way less desire to live up to unrealistic, self-imposed expectations. When I check it from my laptop every few days, it feels incredibly hollow and I usually just close the window after reading a few stories.

One funny habit I retained is taking lots of photos throughout the day--they just stay there in my camera roll now.

I love messengers to keep in touch, but that's just about the only notification I will get.

Facebook is fantastic for keeping up with people's personal details and messaging friends boh old and new. But having the newsfeed be forcefed down your fucking throat is the worst.

The newsfeed is like emotional garbage straight down the esophagus. It doesn't feel too pretty.

So Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator did wonders for me! All the good parts of Facebook, without the shit. It's glorious.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

That's why I unfollowed rather than deactivating. I still like using Facebook as a register of contacts with easy messaging. If I think about someone I'll look up their profile to see what they're up to. I'd use Eradicator but I need something that blocks it on mobile too.

Right. I get distracted from time to time on my phone. Maybe I will follow your method!

> I unfollowed everyone on Facebook so I don't have a news feed

I did the same and it was unbelievably helpful. Local news went long before that. Some of the worst kind of stress, IMO, is seeing horrible things go by that you're powerless to change.

In Android, you can disable App notifications. That may accomplish what you're looking for.

There's also Do Not Disturb mode which turns all notifications, but also all phone calls, off for an adjustable amount of time.

You can do that on iOS also. It's pretty fine-grained. The settings range from "no activity" (useful for Facebook) to "icon badge only" to notifications to "show a modal notification" (useful for my-flight-is-leaving-now airline apps)

Should just turn on "do not disturb" and set it up to let important people's phone numbers through to you.

True, or work out a DND schedule, so that notifs get to you only on certain periods of time. Thing is, this won't "batch" the notifications, it will just shut them up for the period where you're in DND mode, you'll need to check notifications center afterwards or go through all the badged apps to figure out what happened in the meantime.

This is key for me.

I'm already maxed out in how many various messaging services I'm willing to subscribe to.

I buckled and got Slack recently because of a couple of local communities who were using it as their only means of communication. Turns out to be great, and has the wonderful feature of no interrupting notifications unless someone specifically messages me, so I can take part in group conversations with 100+ people involved and only look at them a few times a day.

But installing Slack was effectively the last straw that made me give up on using Pidgin, so I've cut off IM access from friends who only have me on older IM networks.

So what would possibly motivate me to jump to another messenger app that currently none of the people who I know are even on? I'm still resisting installing Facebook Messenger on my phone since I don't want Yet Another Messaging App. At least Facebook Messenger would have people on it I know; Formal would require that I bother people even more by making them install a new app.

Why not use Do Not Disturb mode?

This would do so much damage to Facebook. I keep my phone notifications off — no buzzing or ringing. My smartwatch buzzes for phone calls and text (ok, signal) messages, and that's it. When I have a moment in line, or on the toilet or whatever, THEN I check my notifications. it's wonderful... but my Facebook usage practically disappeared. I had no idea just how much of their usage came from immediacy effects.

> For instance, I just want my iPhone to batch my notifications until a certain time, without me having to worry about becoming distracted.

This is fairly easy:

Go into Settings -> Notifications, click the apps you want, and disable "Show on Lock Screen" and "Sounds" but leave "Show in Notification Center" enabled. Then you can just check them at your leisure.

You could also set the "Alert Style When Unlocked" to None.

This may be tedious if you want to do this for a large number of apps. In that case, as others have suggested, just enable the blanket Do Not Disturb, scheduling it for a specific time if needed.

It's been years since I've pointed out that something doesn't work when cookies are blocked, since it's at least half of the demos I click on.

But out of curiosity, I just checked for an error message on this (blank) page:

    SecurityError: The operation is insecure.
    e.exports.getItem()

So... it's a local storage call, which uses the domain's cookie permissions. That makes more sense (than cookies).

Still, how can a first visit to a site require a getItem call before displaying anything at all?

Others commenters are saying this is not even a demo, but just a landing page. Wow. You might be overengineering.

> Still, how can a first visit to a site require a getItem call before displaying anything at all?

Something like "the index.html page is empty, and gets populated from other templates by (insert Javascript framework here)".

There's this weird fetish now for doing literally everything in Javascript instead of rendering pages server-side ever.

So make this your storage module:

  // For a given domain, localStorage uses the same permissions as cookies.  When
  // cookies are blocked, attempts to access localStorage will throw a Security
  // exception.  We do that test once here so that we can safely test for this
  // object everywhere else.
  define(function() {
  	try {
  		var K = '__test', V = 1, s = window.localStorage;
  		if (s) {
  			s.setItem(K, V);
  			if (V == s.getItem(K)) {
  				s.removeItem(K);
  				return s;
  			}
  		}
  	} catch(e) {}
  	
  	return null;
  });

I mean, I like javascript too. But whether or not your site is rendered entirely by javascript, you should be feature testing for localStorage.

And if your site is rendered entirely by javascript,

(1) it's impossible that rendering to a first-time visitor can depend on something previously stored there.

(2) your site will be hosed by any uncaught error during load

For this to happen on an essentially static page is just laughable.

/rant. Okay, I'm good until 2020.

An async communication protocol already exists in Email. So what makes this different than email?

Maybe it's like only being able to check your email 3 times a day

Yeah, totally. The barrage of constant notifications is the real problem. I used to keep my email open all the time. Over the last year i've disabled all email notification and check every hour or so.

After reading "Deep Work" recently I did the same - I unsubscribed from all services, newsletters, Facebook pages, social apps, etc. that I don't really care about, and I decided to only check e-mail and social media a few times a day in pre-scheduled moments. Does wonders for my productivity and stress levels.

"It's not email."

The focus is not async but the "three times a day" part.

Which email can do just fine, if you set up yours that way.

And Dropbox can be replicated "just fine" with scripts and rsync.

Apples and oranges.

Not really. Another instance of the principle that a purpose-built solution is often better than free ad-hoc scripts/nonstandard configuration that can do exactly the same thing.

And besides, this isn't "the same thing". I know of no MUA that offers the ability to sync only specified threads in realtime.

> Not really. Another instance of the principle that a purpose-built solution is often better than free ad-hoc scripts/nonstandard configuration that can do exactly the same thing.

As long as your needs remain constant and perfectly aligned with the purpose of the app. Which happens exactly never.

Flexible / configurable solutions have higher up-front costs but often turn out better overall - because they can be easily adapted as needs (and wants) change.

INB4 someone says that users are dumb - no, they aren't. The dumb thing is actually the predominant trend in our industry of making everything purpose-built and simpler than possible, which makes people no longer expect themselves to spend even 5 seconds of learning to master a tool.

...makes people no longer expect themselves to spend even 5 seconds of learning to master a tool.

I, too, lament the state of user education in the computing world, but you can't change what people want by giving them an alternative that's technically superior, yet more difficult to set up.

Again, I point to Dropbox. You can most of the way there with some simple scripts and coreutils, but for some reason, my gran wasn't using this until someone wrapped it up in a nice UI and abstracted the complexity away. For some reason, she uses the Gmail web client instead of Mutt, even though the latter is objectively faster and more productive. For some reason, she uses a feature phone instead of a smartphone, even though the latter is easy to use and can do so much more.

There's a lesson here, often lost on more technical audiences, and I think it's this: Time and interest is limited, and developers should respect user's time and preference more than they do now.

Desktop email clients, and to a certain extent mobile native ones, can do this to a good enough approximation by changing one common setting.

Dropbox magic is all in the scripts and combination of the scripts with hosting, rsync etc.

Changing a setting is too much for many potential customers, but writing and/or maintaining an entire service all by yourself is qualitatively different.

Email isn't delivered only three times a day.

sure, but you are in total control with how often you check your email.

I'm in control of what I put in my mouth too. Still don't buy the family size chocolate.

Perhaps you can, but maybe a compulsive eater lacks the self control.

I think this project is more for people who feel compelled to check their emails the second they receive them, but also find that doing so inhibits their productivity.

The lack of self control was why I don't buy the family size. I was making the same point you are.

I think they were saying they lack the self control to avoid buying the family size in the first place.

Based on your logic, why would anyone ever open up a new restaurant?

absolutely; however I confess to not actually be able to successfully implement that control.

I know of quite a few people who will actually exit their email app so no notifications can come in and they won't be tempted - suggesting there might be preexisting demand for this type of thing

Why not just configure fetchmail or your MUA to retrieve mails less frequently?

Because most people don't read email in this way. Sometimes I can't tell if some people on HN just live in a bubble or if it is actually just some attempt at superiority signalling...

Closing the e-mail app is the right way to go[0]. There's no need for it to be open when you're not reading/writing e-mails. The mail gets stored on a mail server anyway.

It's a funny thing. The habit of having your mail client open to get notifications sort of establishes itself in you, but it's very hard to kick. I've managed to do so, and I'm less stressed because of it.

[0] - on desktops. On mobile the equivalent would be to disable background syncing for the e-mail app.

It does if you configure your MUA to only download it 3 times a day.

I don't know of a setting to delay outgoing mail.

Postfix can do it (set default transport to hold, flush the built up queue via cron and `mailq -q`), I'm sure other MTAs can do it too.

OK, but thats not in the client (which is what I meant)

No, it's just in the program your client connects to.

But why would you want to do that? If you want to limit your notifications then you're free to do that, but doing it to your outgoing mail wouldn't help them (they still get almost as much mail anyway) and would just make it take longer for you to get a reply.

While I might not "get it," I never got why you would limit a message to 160 characters either, and those guys seem to be doing ok.

Actually, they're struggling quite a bit.

Who is the They here? Seems like the guys that made the platform and the top engineers working for them all got rich off of the idea.

True - but that's all in the past now.

Twitter's overall future is grim...They're either going to properly niche down and try not to be all things to all men, or die. Just my opinion.

Twitter will never be strapped for cash, it's owned by a filthy rich billionaire.

There's got to come a time when even the filthiest rich billionaires say enough is enough, this project is never going to hit a satisfactory ROI.

TWLO was doing $60 a share last time I checked, up from $10. :)

Indeed, text messaging is still a thing. And Twitter, which shortened that a bit to 140 chars (versus the typical SMS limit for English speakers) is very popular.

It's stays in your outbox until the receiver's preferred delivery time. You can see which messages haven't been sent and start to get a feel for other people's schedules.

Related: Slow web movement

http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web http://theslowweb.com/

Is this an actual product? Or just a landing page?

I was wondering the same. Why are they giving away the idea before they have delivered the product?

To see if there is interest. I believe HN has a rule that a "Show HN" can't be just a landing page. This is just a landing page without the "Show HN."

Why can't someone just check their email 3 times a day? Wouldn't that accomplish the same effect?

Sometimes forced constraints can make a product (cf. Snapchat, Twitter).

The same reason someone can't eat just three Pringles but instead eats the whole can.

Why can't people just delete the photos and videos they receive after 10 seconds?

Because that's a ridiculously stupid idea that defeats the very concept of taking a photo or recording a video.

That, or I am too old already.

Restrictions define human behavior and freedom.

I see it coming: "Pay five bucks to get your message delivered in just ten minutes!"

I raise you: "Pay ten bucks to only get messages delivered to you once a day!"

Pay fifteen bucks for the message, we'll refund the customer their $10, and deliver the message RIGHT NOW!

Good tongue-in-cheek, but I see no incentive for them to add such a feature.

There is zero economic incentive to pay and stay in that frame, and subsequently none for the company to adopt that approach.

Honestly if you want to pay ten bucks to get me a message _right now_, thats okay. The message is probably really important.

It is all the legends of crap that gets send because email isn't even a penny a letter I object to.

> It is all the legends of crap that gets send because email isn't even a penny a letter I object to.

Even physical mail is too cheap; advertisement leaflets and "free" catalogues are like 90% of my total mail volume (after putting "do not deliver advertisements to this mailbox" stickers on everything), a worse quota than with email (after setting up basic spam filters).

This is one of the things that make me hate advertising industry the most. Just count up the physical spam you get weekly, multiply by your country's population and divide by average household - and you get a good low-bound estimate of how much paper, ink and energy goes from a manufacturer straight to garbage can, with the sole side effect of pissing people off. It's ridiculous.

How is this better than DND? My messages are there when I feel like looking at them.

Two ways it's better: it sets the expectation with the sender that you won't get an immediate response, and it provides a better option for those without the discipline/self-control

From what I know, you cannot fine-tune your DND. For instance, I want certain notifications to show up versus not.

I prefer "Cellular Data Off," because there is greater need distance that way.

Android has a few filters: alarms only, priority notifications, calls/messages from specific contacts, etc.

I agree that greater flexibility in creating custom rules would be welcome though.

Flagged for being a landing page for something that doesn't exist.

Nice! This reminds me of an app I worked on many years ago but never finished. A Twitter clone that only let you post 1 message per day. The idea being that if you can only post once per day you'll make your posts more thoughtful.

I think delivering messages 3 times a day is the wrong approach. There is a need for synchronous communications, it just should not be chat channels you are connected to all day long.

One preferable idea would be to use notification channels that would reduce significantly the noise you receive from your pairs. I speak at length about the idea here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/channels-best-way-handle-inte...

Well, whenever I install a messenger (seems like I am doing this too frequently last few months, since every group of friends like to use a completely different messenger), first thing I try is a simple "ping-pong" messages, that is - "is this working?" - "yes, it is.", usually even with seeing the friend face to face.

I cannot imagine these "ping-pong" messages - to even establish if the messenger is working, that the other person has it installed correctly etc - would take about a day.

Is that a problem? Everyone is always in a rush these days :) by its very nature. If you need this messenger app working "right now" then it won't do the job for yo

Seems like the "watch" feature is what makes this idea interesting. You receive batched updates for a channel when you're not paying attention to it, and if both participants in the channel are paying attention, then you receive real-time messages. You're limited in the number of channels you can pay attention to.

I don't really see what's stopping Messenger, Slack, et al. for adding a "work" or "focus" mode that achieves this trivially though.

You can do this on any e-mail client by just using "offline mode".

Now, I don't like the concept. It opens the possibilities to a world of excuses and lack of accountability.

Similar to an idea I've had for a slow messenger.

It talks about threads and "number of tasks you're working on". Is this thing targeted for use at work? because that seems like the worst use case for the limitations it outlines.

I imagine it more as a digital snail mail with a digital mailman bringing you messages once a day. An effort to bring the romanticism of a messenger bringing you an important message.

Anyone interested in interruption free messaging should check out WiredIn: https://wiredinapp.com

It's an existing product, so you can try it yourself. The biggest difference is that the interruptions are happening at the same time for the whole team, therefore increasing the total quiet-time of the company.

this looks like a fun project, maybe there could be some use among a small circle of friends, for example.

that said, i won't speak for what the market will sustain, but in terms of what we need as a society, i believe we are past the point of needing to invent new messaging platforms. we have email, we have xmpp,(and we have a smattering of other pretty good platforms like WhatsApp, though it is not open) etc. we have mature spam filtering technology built around email, we have TLS, etc etc . this stuff already works. and when it doesn't, we should be working together to improve upon them. there's a lot of work to be done making existing communication more secure, and also things like personal data warehousing of one's communications, etc. etc.

we are not in need of another app (i don't even know what platforms this will run on -- linux? probably not.) that does less than what email did 40 years ago.

Is there an actual app here, or is this just a website describing something that would be nice to have right now?

Semi-ironic that the very first FAQ is about how to circumvent the main feature of the service, no?

On the conceptual level, this seems great, because it removes the expectations of a timely response from both parties (sender and receiver). However, other (more immediate) channels will probably get used instead, precisely where this app would be most valuable.

It seems like the "Watch" feature would actually take care of this. If both people are watching the same chat, they would both get real time notifications, and could chat in real time. The app limits how many threads you can be watching, though, trying to force you to actively opt-in to things that you want to pay attention to because they are directly relevant to what you are doing right now.

Well, that seems unfortunate. The value I see in this application is its explicit asynchronous nature which saves you from the burden of checking (or even thinking about) messages or email. The ability to be unreachable where the other party knows about it. Because right now, it's considered rude if I don't manage to reply quickly enough.

If this turns out to be useful, I could see a situation in which this could be very useful. I've always disliked the way in which calls and SMS disrupt people's actions.

Why not an app that sends messages when you're not busy?

It would be hard to detect the best time to deliver the message. Naive approaches could get it almost exactly wrong, as one of the times when I really don't want to be interrupted is when I'm just sitting and reading something, and not really interacting much. I'm sure there are better ways of determining if the user isn't focusing on anything, and maybe some of them would work well as a trigger for delivering messages. That would be pretty nifty.

Correct, it would be hard, which is why if you we're able to figure it out, it'd be useful and hard to copy.

I like the idea of this. But it should be an email client.

I made a Chrome extension for Gmail which includes a timed inbox lockout feature. You could configure this so that you can only see your inbox at specific times of day.

https://inboxwhenready.org/

This is just email.

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