Ask HN: Tips for Reducing the Number of Inboxes
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?
86 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadEssentially a Matrix-powered service focused on bringing a ton of inboxes. I've heard it's great, but never tried it myself.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It would be fantastic if you could switch some apps to whitelist mode.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
Haven’t kept up to date with matrix - does it even allow e2ee with group chats using a bridge?
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'.
Regulation is hard. This doesn't mean that rules shouldn't exist.
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.
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?
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.
- 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.
I haven’t used it myself but might be what you’re looking for.
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.
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.
Decide what you are comfortable keeping up with, and tell your tribe to use those methods to contact you.
- 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 :-)
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/
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?
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 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.
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.
Also, there is no reason why you couldn’t be one of those friends who “only use Signal”.
> 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