Ask HN: Tips for Reducing the Number of Inboxes | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tips for Reducing the Number of Inboxes

78 pointsjhylands85 comments

Does anyone have any tips for handling the fact that there is an ever growing number of apps to check messages on. I have to check linked in, email, texts, messenger, whatsapp, signal, telegram, slack etc Everyone seems to have their preference I have loads of friends who only use messenger, some who only use signal. As a dyslexic I find it super hard to keep up and end up missing and forgetting loads of things as a result. Does everyone just deal with it? Or is there a way to centralise my communication without hiring a pa?

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The EU is planning to require big online messaging services to be interoperable.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-d...

This would solve it. Then you could simply use a single app.

This is a political thing. So, vote for it, talk to the politicians.

I don't see how this is possible if you also have E2EE. Great example is email encryption via PGP. It exists, it's used (rarely) in some cases, but it's so poorly implemented to the point of being useless unless

It will be possible because the user will have the encryption key

Why should this be an issue at all? It's my account, I should know the encryption key & algorithm. Any open source app can then implement this.

How exactly would you implement an interoperable E2EE group chat app where you can arbitrarily add and remove people like with iMessage?

The EU law linked does not actually recommend anything specifically, just vaguely states interoperability being a goal.

Certain apps will have certain functionality. Unless you're willing to constrain the functionality it's not really possible.

Right now everyone could already use email which supports encryption. They don't, though.

> How exactly would you implement an interoperable E2EE group chat app where you can arbitrarily add and remove people like with iMessage?

Doesn't the matrix chat app allow for this? Might be useful to learn how they do it if this is of interest.

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/end-to-end-encryption-impleme...

How is the problem you're imagining solved by having just a single company in charge of the app?

It’s not - the company usually also has the keys, so you have to trust them.

If you call that E2EE then all E is.

If you want interoperability you would need true e2ee, I never claimed single company regular encryption was e2ee

The same way as they're doing it right now, just well-documented and open. Let the bigcrops create working groups to hammer out the details.

On the contrary, genuine end-to-end encryption is only possible this way. First-party end-to-end encryption is broken by design. (I’ve explained somewhat more with particular examples in a few comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+end-to-end+encrypt....)

To be sure, interoperability requires a suitable spec for other clients to implement, but there’s absolutely nothing special about end-to-end encryption in this picture—it’s just a feature to implement like any other.

tell me then, how exactly would this work as new features are developed - do all apps have to be static in functionality indefinitely? how would it work with group chats where you can add and remove people arbitrarily?

> tell me then, how exactly would this work as new features are developed - do all apps have to be static in functionality indefinitely?

Can you give an example of a "new feature" that you think would be stymied by this?

> how would it work with group chats where you can add and remove people arbitrarily?

I don't quite understand what issue you're pointing to. I'm not sure if you're unsure of how e2e encryption works or something else. Can you ask your question again with more specificity?

Sending money for example.

Haven’t kept up to date with matrix - does it even allow e2ee with group chats using a bridge?

Why would requiring interoperability of messages or video calls prevent an app from implementing a "send money" feature?

Also, if you want to make a "send money" feature, why would it being interoperable preclude you from doing it? Bank transfers are already interoperable, why can't a send money feature be?

> e2ee with group chats

See: https://interoperability.news/2022/03/end-to-end-encrypted-g...

The way to achieve interoperability while still being able to innovate is to follow the model of browsers (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). The process works something like this:

1. Everyone has the same basic functionality, you can switch between browsers and (mostly) everything works the same way, renders the same way and so on

2. Browser XYZ decides they want a cool feature where they expose data from a fingerprint reader as a JS API

3. Browser XYZ implements said feature and sees if websites starts using it.

4. Standards-bodies might start noticing that the feature was implemented in Browser XYZ and keeps an eye on it

5. If a second browser implements a similar/the same feature (although slightly different API or other incompatibility), standards bodies starts working on creating a standard for said feature, together with Browser XYZ and the others who participate in the standards organization

6. Once standard is done, reviewed and published, the browsers who want to have the feature go back and adjust/add/remove things until they comply with the standard.

Obviously, it's not exactly like this, but the process is more or less like this.

It's not hard to imagine the same for messaging services. The base-layer is that everyone can send text messages to everyone. This we can all agree on, so a standard would be for that first.

Then if some messaging service wants to add a new feature, they start working on that and deploying it for their service. If a second messaging service deploys the same feature, standard bodies should work on getting a interoperable model of that feature, that then all messaging services can use and hence work across all of them.

It’s funny you mention browsers because there are a ton of sites and features that only work on chrome and not safari.

Not sure that’s the model to follow. Fundamentally though chat is different - where would the messages be stored for example? Who will guarantee deliver ability?

Email is federated and has all of these things but sucks and so everyone made their own thing. I’ve yet to see evidence this just wouldn’t regress to email again

> It’s funny you mention browsers because there are a ton of sites and features that only work on chrome and not safari.

Is that because Safari doesn't implement everything decided by the standards bodies or because Chrome deploys their own features? Probably a mix of both, but eventually there is a convergence.

Things work surprisingly well in modern times. I'm not sure when you started using the web, but back in the 90s/early 00s, the situation was a lot worse then it was today, and the browser standards are probably the biggest collaborative achievement between corporate entities in the modern web-driven world.

> Not sure that’s the model to follow. Fundamentally though chat is different - where would the messages be stored for example? Who will guarantee deliver ability?

It might seem fundamentally different on the surface, but I think not. Just like the browsers doesn't handle where the resources it loads are coming from, messaging services can be the same way. Think IRC, or even your own example, email. As long as there is a user-agent where services look consistent, the situation would be drastically improved.

> Email is federated and has all of these things but sucks and so everyone made their own thing. I’ve yet to see evidence this just wouldn’t regress to email again

Email is another great example of a success when it comes to this. Yes, email has it's warts, but you can essentially sign up for any provider, or even create your own, and receive/send emails to any of the others ones.

I don't see "email" as a regression compared the IM situation we have today. Imagine you would need a gmail account to send emails to gmail users, yahoo account to send emails to yahoo users. That would be awful! But you're right that email could be a lot better, but still, I prefer it to the alternatives from the IM world.

My point is that email basically hasn't evolved meaningfully from the 80s and other than the main feature of sending text all of the functionality is locked between specific providers. Tags vs. folders vs. labels, chat without email, encryption, etc. Nothing other than the baseline functionality is standardized.

Nothing other than baseline functionality should be standardized. Client features are totally irrelevant to the goal of sending and receiving messages.

Ah, I see the issue you’re going for now: feature evolution. Certainly that’s the trickiest part of the scheme. I still wouldn’t say end-to-end encryption is special here; certainly it’s likely to be a more intrusive update than most, but if introducing it late you’d still handle it the same way as any other, most likely as an optional feature for a certain period of time, after which incompatible clients can no longer connect.

Ah, history is mostly repeating itself (minus the need for government intervention ~20 years ago).

We had similar issues in the late 90s / early 2000s with ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Chat, etc..

Apps like https://www.pidgin.im/ existed to let you check everything within 1 app because all of these apps spoke the same protocol or close enough that things mostly worked.

This is a bit different though.

It's one thing to allow independent applications to use the protocol and service, like Pidgin and others. And also many services did not like this and repeatedly changed their proprietary custom protocol to make this difficult.

It's another thing to be interoperable between services. Then you could continue to use only one service but still be able to talk to people on other services.

Yeah that's true, in the Pidgin case you were still signing up for each service independently. Pidgin let you communicate through its app instead of the service provider's app. None of the service providers had data about the others.

I'm not sure how they plan to make things fully interoperable. Wouldn't that mean every chat app would need a complete chat history for every user multiplied by every chat app out there? Or instead they introduce a shared parent company / govt. entity where all chat messages are sent through, stored and pushed to users. Time to bust out the tin foil hats!

I think you could make it work with only some username namespace. Eg: whatsapp.cerium vs fb.cerium. Facebook would forward messages to whatsapp usernames and vice versa.

Honestly, those apps should just expose themselves via email and be done with it.

Why is this a 'political thing'?

Did I miss the campaign to define SQL? Of the one to specify the x86 ISA? Perhaps they should merge the arm and x86 architectures, they're both CPUs right?

This feels very far away from a 'political thing'.

Politicians shouldn't be in charge of defining interoperability standards. But politicians can mandate that companies be interoperable.

Regulation is hard. This doesn't mean that rules shouldn't exist.

Just because they can doesn't mean they should.

Should they mandate that video game platforms be interoperable? What about mandating that every company produces apps that interoperate with windows Mac Linux and mobile.

Difficult question indeed. And that even leaving aside the technical questions.

But wouldn't it be nice? Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, all together? Or always cross platform apps? Is there any real benefit for the user that they are not interoperable?

Saying wouldn't it be nice without proposing how such a scheme would work without picking winners and losers is naive. The devil is in the details as they say.

Ubitiquious cross platform apps, sure! Just 3x your development team size - will your app still make sense to make with those costs? Oh don't worry - just replatform to a cross platform toolkit (and stop working on new features for 6-12months and retrain the entire team).

I just don't see why it's worth bringing the blunt hammer of government intervention here - let alone a reasonable path for regulation implementation.

It'd be more likely they'd mandate Mac, Linux and Mobile to all support a common app format. Which they already kind of do, the web.

Wouldn't that basically set protocols in stone and block any future improvement or research? Standards are generally good, but I can't see legally mandated protocols as anything but guaranteed ossification.

People like to diss email as a "todo list that other people can add items to", but really, this holds for just about all communication channels.

So for me, what worked is to only use one channel (in my case, my work gmail) as a valid TODO-inbox. Everything else doesn't count.

This means that if someone WhatsApps me something that requires a TODO, I ask them to email me a reminder. In my particular social situation, this tends to work. If they don't want to do this, it's probably not important enough

I keep my email itself clean by using Andreas Klinger's classic gmail-TODO-setup (https://klinger.io/posts/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmai...). That article is 9 years old now but it still works perfectly, despite Google's reputation for killing niche apps/features.

Then, I enable email notifications in key apps (eg Slack and GitHub), most of which I archive right away, but occasionally mark as a TODO using the gmail-TODO-setup. This means I never have a secondary "unread message as TODO items" list in slack, or similar in GitHub. It's very nice.

Finally, I use "Simple Gmail Notes" (https://bart.solutions/simple-gmail-notes/) to add little notes to myself about what a TODO-email is about. eg "review this" or "delegate to someone", etc.

I'm just listening to a talk by Scott Hanselman about things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWPgUn8tL8s

His solution: Schedule it. Reserve time in your calendar to check each of the sites based on urgency.

And if you don't want to be contacted by some method, don't reply using it. The best way to get more email is to send more email.

Things that have helped at least mitigate this problem include:

- For things which don't spam you (e.g. messengers like Signal or WhatsApp), use similar settings for the various apps on your phone. If you don't want a lot of noise, set them to show you unread messages as badges and put them on the front page of your phone

- For things which are used infrequently or do spam you, set up email alerts when possible (e.g. when someone @-mentions you on one of your thousand Slack workspaces), combined with email filters which put things in folders which you can check much like the badged apps.

- If a message comes in on a rarely-checked channel and you don't get it for a long time, respond with an apology on a more preferred channel (e.g. a friend messages you on LinkedIn and you respond with an email or message on Signal).

- Accept that you have to let some messages slip through, and trust that your relationships can handle some people having to try a second channel to reach you, some of the time.

My personal is:

- own your own domain name, so you can transfer it as needed

- own your email, having as many aliases as you need

- download ALL your mails locally (fetchmail, OfflineIMAP, mbsync, ...) perhaps on a homeserver and use them in a local maildir with a local client, like notmuch, so you have a unified inbox for anything

- avoid proprietary messaging platforms and teach others to do the same

that's works for me so far, surely many try to put pressure on me for WA, Slack etc but I always successfully decline. Anything is NOT ONLY centralized but also unified. In the same tool (Emacs/EXWM) I have mails, feeds, usenet etc I do not like much Gnus but in that case I can also get HN and Reddit there, with the same UIs, local antispam, local scoring etc.

The tip is always the same: as any of us you feel the need of classic desktop model and we all miss it, but something we can still do to have some kind of substitutes :-)

I personally use Matrix and bridge all my social accounts to there. It works super well, because my friends don't have to switch their app, but I see everyone in just one app. matrix.org/bridges

Worth mentioning: https://www.beeper.com/

Essentially a Matrix-powered service focused on bringing a ton of inboxes. I've heard it's great, but never tried it myself.

https://element.io/element-one -- I'm using a Matrix Signal bridge (meh, it bugs quite often, kicks me out, doesn't properly update keys when people get a new phone). Also does not support calls etc.

Not currently open to sign up. :( I’ve joined the queue to get an account though

I joined the queue over a year ago and have yet to receive any communication about signing up.

This is what I do too. Sadly, there's no good call support which prevents me from uninstalling the relevant apps entirely, but all messengers pipe through Matrix now.

I'd much rather see people move to Matrix (or Signal, I suppose) than to keep having to use WhatsApp but that's a pointless fight I will never win.

Unfortunately, setting these up requires you to have a spare server at home.

I struggled with this a couple of years ago and then decided I will reduce the channels. Now I have email (asynchronous/long-form/personal/professional), signal (personal networks) and linkedin (professional network). That's it.

This has been very helpful for me and I no longer have the fear of missing out.

If it is important enough, people know how best to reach me.

I simply refuse to use a lot of those channels. Email is 90% of my communcation, almost everyone has it. People learn that I am responsive only by email.

I faced a similar problem, a whole bunch of sites that all have their own unread items, notifications and so-forth.

I started writing a desktop app, Wavebox (https://wavebox.io) about 6 years ago to help me deal with this. It lets you add all your apps down the side of the window, each one with its own unread badge & notifications. Might be something that's helpful?

I don't have a perfect solution for you but this problem has been on my mind for a couple years now and I was calling it "communication fatigue".

> Does everyone just deal with it?

Basically, yes. In my case I just end up not stressing about responding to things in a timely manner. Outside of my work apps (outlook,slack,teams), I am the most responsive on email and Instagram chats but that's mainly because I open and use that app on a daily basis. In Whatsapp, I mute any group chat that is too active because I don't need distracting notifications every hours or less.

Do I miss things? yes, but I've never really missed anything super important and my friends know to shoot me a SMS text or use one of my more active mediums (instagram or gmail) to get in touch with me for important things.

The best I can say is just prioritize and train your friends/family to know which medium you are most responsive in. Disable notifications on apps you barely interact with or mute very active individual chats that aren't important

Why do you have to check anything manually? Just install their apps and receive push notifications for them. You can also make the notifications silent to reduce distractions.

Or if your phone supports notification badges on icons, just place their icons on home screen and you'll notice what app has updates by just checking the badge counts.

And receive unrelated spam? No thanks. While emails and texts are fine, I 100% would not trust linked in with push notifications

Doesn't Android allow you to select which category of notifications you want to receive? That can be useful here.

The problem is that it is a blacklist not a whitelist. So these apps that spam a lot just create a new category every week.

It would be fantastic if you could switch some apps to whitelist mode.

What applications do that?

The Google Search/Assistant app seems to be one of the worst that I have installed. No matter how many categories I mute I seem to get a new spam notification every couple of weeks. Unfortunately there are 2-3 useful notification categories so I haven't completely shut it down now. Google Maps also used to be pretty bad for this but I don't seem to recall any new categories for many months now.

Who sends you personal messages on LinkedIn? Personally, I don't even trust LinkedIn to have an app installed on my phone. But I haven't received even a single spam notification from any of the major chat platforms.

Good for you. I get dozens a day.

Are these first-party messages from the platform, or is it more akin to spam email where they're just letting through spam messages from spammers?

Mostly first party.

Interesting. I have all of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal and Telegram (+ SMS and email, but I'm guessing these aren't the issue) installed on my phone with notifications enabled, and I only get notified when I receive a message. I'd be interested to know which services are spamming you.

just stop using all of those apps - done. Pick 2-3 and cut the rest.

amazing advice, thank you for your valuable contribution to this discussion

It's just the truth - what's your suggestion?

Truth if you want to isolate.

OP's point is clearly to stay connected with his friends etc. So simply stopping isn't solving the problem.

OK, what's your solution? Users of all of those apps necessarily need a phone and/or email. The apps aren't necessary. You can just email or SMS for literally all of 'em. Either you stop using them or just deal with it. How many people on here regularly use 7+ different messaging apps for their friends? In my experience people usually use one for work, and maybe 2-3 tops for personal life.

Errrrr...

I have a personal inbox (Fastmail), three Google Suites/Apps for various companies I'm involved with, a personal Gmail (for mostly spam). That does not include any chats (mostly personal, but also some work: WhatsApp for 90%, Telegram for ~7%, Signal for 3%), then there are three slack workspaces and a Matrix/Element to keep track of. And I guess there's Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook for misc personal/work stuff (less critical, but do get messages on there).

I would pay money for an app that combines all of this (and works) like Element One or Beeper (problem is that Signal Bridge on Element has caused a ton of problems/bugs, and I heard of reports of people's Telegram account getting banned using Element One).

OP says he has friends that say they only use Messenger or only Signal etc, and everyone has their own preference. Sounds like they have the right idea! Why be the only one accommodating everybody.

This is a good suggestion. At some points in our lives, we all will have to decide who to stay in touch with and who we can detach from and not worry about daily or weekly updates. If too many apps and messages/notifications are difficult to deal with, then cutting it down (to whatever is manageable) does help.

For personal needs, I settled on a single email account (Google Workspace) that pulls emails from all my other accounts (acts as an email client) plus Signal which also handles texts. As for people who use Facebook/Messenger, WhatsApp, or Telegram, I just text them.

For professional needs, I'm also at a loss. I have Outlook, Slack, Signal/texts, Jira notifications, Confluence notifications, LinkedIn, MS Teams... and then Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex but these are at least scheduled. I never come across anyone using WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook/Messenger professionally but I'm sure it's coming and will be a joy.

I have seen people happy with Beeper[1] but I'm neither willing to hand over my keys, nor self-host it.

[1] https://www.beeper.com/

We work with lots of russian/ukrainian devs, and we're using Telegram.

I just moved to Signal and told everyone I was going to do that. Some have followed and some haven't. At a point I had 6 messaging apps to talk to 6 different people and it was untenable especially after moving to Graphene OS as I didnt want to run microg.

Those who havent migrated, well, not a huge loss and sone have switched over to email. Discussions also gained a bit more depth with the move to long-form writing. It really comes down to this - do you want to have fewer apps? then make the switch. Do you want to talk to everyone on their preferred platforms - continue as is. There are some apps that help mitigate this (I believe element can through addons) but I wanted to cut down not add complexity.

I've actually increased the amount of inboxes (especially email). I label into category/topic (eg finance) and sometimes sub-topic (eg taxes) inboxes based on sender or subject/message content. It keeps my main inbox clean and easy to go through. Alert type emails (calendar invites, password resets etc.) stay in the main inbox.

I keep my work and tech inboxes open throughout the day. Things like news, finance/markets, etc. I check every few days. Others I check whenever they're relevant (taxes, cooking, entertainment etc.)

It took a lot of work to set up but it works well for me.

For message apps I just rely on the notifications.

I’ve seen this service recommended by some people - https://texts.com/

I haven’t used it myself but might be what you’re looking for.

> Texts charges users a monthly subscription to use the app.

This is the _only_ reference to the pricing on their website. I'm not signing up to the app just to see what the pricing is, it's baffling they don't include that information on their main website.

The pricing was undecided since we're in private beta, just updated the FAQ.

That was quick! Thanks for including the info in the FAQ now, it's much appreciated.

I have Blackberry Hub on my phone. I found it only marginally useful at first but it does integrate with all big services (if you have the apps installed) and centralizes the viewing of it. I am not a powers or use it very much but it available maybe you can check that out. Pretty sure there are other 3rd parties that do this little trick.

You know the advice that if a friend is only a friend because you are connected on Facebook, maybe you aren't really friends? That same logic holds true if your relationships are dependent on any specific app.

Decide what you are comfortable keeping up with, and tell your tribe to use those methods to contact you.

Proprietary apps are only installed for exploratory purposes and may or may not be checked quarterly.

I'm on email. If you want to be my friend, use open standards. If you want to reach me, use email.

No, you can't reach me on Facebook or WhatsApp. If you DM me on Twitter, I will say please email me.

I am sure this works for you, but I think one must realize and be alright with the idea that making it hard to be someone's friend is a good way to make the average person not your friend. Do I wish I could convince all my friends and family to use Matrix over Slack or the like? Of course. But ultimately I prefer the people over the technology, and I'd rather be where they are than be alone in my tower of principles.

I think using matrix you can link all your matrix app together and receive messages in one place

That’s what I use a phone for. You get all the different notifications from all the different apps in one notification stream.

Also, there is no reason why you couldn’t be one of those friends who “only use Signal”.

For me, the only need was using iMessage on non Apple devices. To solve that I am using a MacOS VM with AirMessage installed on it. It lets me access iMessage from a browser.

I use wupfh.com and get everything sent to the fax, much easier

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