7 ms·

Ask HN: Tips for Reducing the Number of Inboxes

78 points by jhylands 4y ago

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?

thebiblelover7 4y ago
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
- Tmpod 4y ago
  Worth mentioning: https://www.beeper.com/ 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.
  - jhylands 4y ago
    Not currently open to sign up. :( I’ve joined the queue to get an account though
    - sdfhbdf 4y ago
      I joined the queue over a year ago and have yet to receive any communication about signing up.
  - Yeri 4y ago
    https://element.io/element-one 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.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  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.
- xigoi 4y ago
  Unfortunately, setting these up requires you to have a spare server at home.
theshrike79 4y ago
I'm just listening to a talk by Scott Hanselman about things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWPgUn8tL8s 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.
endisneigh 4y ago
just stop using all of those apps - done. Pick 2-3 and cut the rest.
- bil7 4y ago
  amazing advice, thank you for your valuable contribution to this discussion
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    It's just the truth - what's your suggestion?
    - samh748 4y ago
      Truth if you want to isolate.
- samh748 4y ago
  OP's point is clearly to stay connected with his friends etc. So simply stopping isn't solving the problem.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    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.
    - Yeri 4y ago
      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).
infinityplus1 4y ago
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.
- orangepanda 4y ago
  And receive unrelated spam? No thanks. While emails and texts are fine, I 100% would not trust linked in with push notifications
  - infinityplus1 4y ago
    Doesn't Android allow you to select which category of notifications you want to receive? That can be useful here.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      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.
      - sodality2 4y ago
        What applications do that?
        kevincox 4y ago
        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.
jll29 4y ago
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.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  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.
albertzeyer 4y ago
The EU is planning to require big online messaging services to be interoperable. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-digital-markets-act-imessage-whatsapp-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.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  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
  - dingleberry420 4y ago
    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.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      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.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - vageli 4y ago
        > 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-implementation-guide https://matrix.org/docs/guides/end-to-end-encryption-impleme...
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
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.
revorad 4y ago
I’ve seen this service recommended by some people - https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ I haven’t used it myself but might be what you’re looking for.
- ikornaselur 4y ago
  > 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.
  - KishanBagaria 4y ago
    The pricing was undecided since we're in private beta, just updated the FAQ.
    - ikornaselur 4y ago
      That was quick! Thanks for including the info in the FAQ now, it's much appreciated.
vivegi 4y ago
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.
codingdave 4y ago
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.
kkfx 4y ago
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 :-)
simlan 4y ago
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.
blfr 4y ago
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/ https://www.beeper.com/
- Icko 4y ago
  We work with lots of russian/ukrainian devs, and we're using Telegram.
croisillon 4y ago
I use wupfh.com and get everything sent to the fax, much easier
john61 4y ago
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.
cipher222 4y ago
I think using matrix you can link all your matrix app together and receive messages in one place
thomas101 4y ago
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 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?
starik36 4y ago
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.
pSYoniK 4y ago
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.
abendy 4y ago
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.
skrebbel 4y ago
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-gmail-more-efficiently 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/ 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.
coffeeblack 4y ago
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”.
flanbiscuit 4y ago
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

78 points by jhylands 4y ago

thebiblelover7 4y ago

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

Tmpod 4y ago
Worth mentioning: https://www.beeper.com/ 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.
- jhylands 4y ago
  Not currently open to sign up. :( I’ve joined the queue to get an account though
  - sdfhbdf 4y ago
    I joined the queue over a year ago and have yet to receive any communication about signing up.
- Yeri 4y ago
  https://element.io/element-one 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.
jeroenhd 4y ago
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.
xigoi 4y ago
Unfortunately, setting these up requires you to have a spare server at home.

theshrike79 4y ago

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

endisneigh 4y ago

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

bil7 4y ago
amazing advice, thank you for your valuable contribution to this discussion
- endisneigh 4y ago
  It's just the truth - what's your suggestion?
  - samh748 4y ago
    Truth if you want to isolate.
samh748 4y ago
OP's point is clearly to stay connected with his friends etc. So simply stopping isn't solving the problem.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  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.
  - Yeri 4y ago
    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).

infinityplus1 4y ago

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.

orangepanda 4y ago
And receive unrelated spam? No thanks. While emails and texts are fine, I 100% would not trust linked in with push notifications
- infinityplus1 4y ago
  Doesn't Android allow you to select which category of notifications you want to receive? That can be useful here.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    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.
    - sodality2 4y ago
      What applications do that?
      - kevincox 4y ago
        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.

jll29 4y ago

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.

eddieroger 4y ago
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.

albertzeyer 4y ago

The EU is planning to require big online messaging services to be interoperable. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/24/22995431/european-union-digital-markets-act-imessage-whatsapp-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.

endisneigh 4y ago
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
- dingleberry420 4y ago
  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.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vageli 4y ago
      > 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-implementation-guide https://matrix.org/docs/guides/end-to-end-encryption-impleme...

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

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.

revorad 4y ago

I’ve seen this service recommended by some people - https://texts.com/ https://texts.com/ I haven’t used it myself but might be what you’re looking for.

ikornaselur 4y ago
> 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.
- KishanBagaria 4y ago
  The pricing was undecided since we're in private beta, just updated the FAQ.
  - ikornaselur 4y ago
    That was quick! Thanks for including the info in the FAQ now, it's much appreciated.

vivegi 4y ago

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.

codingdave 4y ago

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.

kkfx 4y ago

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 :-)

simlan 4y ago

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.

blfr 4y ago

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/ https://www.beeper.com/

Icko 4y ago
We work with lots of russian/ukrainian devs, and we're using Telegram.

croisillon 4y ago

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

john61 4y ago

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.

cipher222 4y ago

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

thomas101 4y ago

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 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?

starik36 4y ago

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.

pSYoniK 4y ago

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.

abendy 4y ago

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.

skrebbel 4y ago

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-gmail-more-efficiently 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/ 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.

coffeeblack 4y ago

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”.

flanbiscuit 4y ago

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