The Social App where you only Post Once a Year
I've built a little social app called Slowpost.
I’ve built a simple little social app called Slowpost (https://slowpost.org).
Slowpost is about as minimal as a social app can be. There is no app, no feed, no likes, no ranking, and you can only post once a year.
In fact it’s barely even an app. It’s really just a little tool that lets people subscribe to a personal newsletter email that you send once a year. You can subscribe to mine at https://slowpost.org/robennals
Existing social media isn’t serving us well. It’s addictive, it makes us angry and anxious, and it distracts us from the real world around us. There is good evidence that use of social media (particularly via phones) is causing all sorts of societal problems.
But social media isn’t entirely without value. There is a genuine need for an easy way to stay in contact with the loose connections that you might otherwise lose touch with. The old school friends, the distant relatives, the former coworkers, the interesting people you met at parties.
Back in the days before the internet, one of the ways we stayed connected with such people was by sending an annual letter, often timed around Christmas or New Year.
At their worst, these letters could be braggy, sanctimonious, fake-cheerful, and boring. But at their best, they were awesome. A good letter would let you know about people who now lived near you, or had been thinking about similar things to you, or had read books you wanted to read, or had solved problems you were dealing with, or had moved nearby, or worked at a company you wanted to work at. A good letter helped you feel you better understood someone you hadn’t known as well before.
A good letter was a gift, and a good letter often re-awakened or deepened a friendship that might otherwise have faded away.
Last year I stopped using social media entirely, and decided to replace my social media usage with an annual letter. I sent a letter to an ad-hoc list of people who I thought might be interested, and I got a great response. Lots of people told me how much they appreciated reading it, and I ended up hanging out with lots of people I hadn’t seen for a while.
But the biggest pain point I felt when writing it was knowing who to send it to. Some people I almost didn’t send it to because I thought I’d be bugging them, and then they responded enthusiastically when they received it. Some people I only thought of sending it to after it was so late that sending it to them might have felt weird.
So I decided to write a simple app that lets someone say they are writing an annual email, and lets others express interest in receiving it.
Slowpost is a simple app that does pretty much the absolute minimum to let you create a profile and have others subscribe to it. You still send your annual letter by email. All Slowpost does is give you the email addresses of the people who asked to receive it.
It also has basic groups that act merely as a list of people so you can find their profiles. Everyone who subscribes gets to receive an email, but you can choose who receives the “close friends” version that might be more personal.
You can create your own profile at https://slowpost.org or subscribe to mine at https://slowpost.org/robennals.
Slowpost is unrelated to my day job. This is just a fun little hobby project on the side.
I wrote Slowpost over the course of a couple of weekend evenings. Or rather, Claude Code wrote Slowpost, with a small amount of direction from me. I just wrote a doc outlining the core idea and left Claude Code to write the whole app. Even the visual design and a lot of the text copy is AI-created. I really just acted as mentor. It’s fun to see the extent to which AI is now capable of writing a usable app almost entirely by itself.
Slowpost is rough around the edges, but maybe it’s a starting point for something useful—a shift from the noise of constant updates to the intentionality of an annual connection. There is magic in re-awakening a friendship, and I’ve seen how effectively one single annual email can do that.
Even if you don’t decide to use Slowpost, I encourage you to start an annual email.