> 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.