Incoming! Too many New Friend's Letters ??!!

May 26, 2020

As we start the day, Early, a Notification :

On my phone screen, as I fired it up, to turn on wifi and start Slowly to check new mail... and for some coin hunting, as usual.

Things have been very quiet lately on Reddit subs, so I was happy to see an incoming Direct Message. From my good friend -littleghost. :)

And we went from there; very soon I was using my text editor (the free and full featured EditPad Lite, recommended), to write freely without the constrains of the Reddit Chat message entry box.

Writers need unbound space for proper expression, imo. As soon as I had a few paragraphs, I knew Today's Blog topic was at hand — here it is. :)

I have requested and obtained LittleGhost's permission to quote her, use a screen capture in the blog, and as a Good Sport, it was duly granted. Thanks, dear friend! :)

LittleGhost's Incoming Chat message :

Hi Yann, I thought I'd just send a quick message to a long time Slowly user... I am dying internally xD

I decided earlier today I would turn back on my “accepting new friends” feature til I got ONE new pen pal...

I forgot to check, and when I went back I had three despite it being a short while.

Then I scrolled, and realised it was actually five.

Then when I turned it off, I figure a couple people must have still been writing to me because now I have SEVEN NEW INCOMING LETTERS xD

How do you tend to manage when you have too many letters, lol?

And then we started Talking...

Good morning (to me, evening to you) Ghost!! Oh, that is priceless — one of those things you could write a Slowly Stories about, seriously — save some notes and do it, as this is prime writing material.

Hahahahah, I'm glad you think so. Hopefully something good comes out of it but honestly I'm low-key hoping that some users were lazy and didn't bother to read my profile so I have an excuse to talk to less xD

ok, and look what I got for you... fresh from my text editor!!

Now, engaging the Editing Tools for some free writing :

Amazing how quickly that happened, there might be another incoming users wave possibly. Interesting.

I did notice one thing, related to that more or less. I talked my brother into trying Slowly, so I could write to him and forward some interesting letters.

I had Slowly set up on my iPad mini so to get him going, I uninstalled the app there; then reinstalled, and started the new user creation (a bit hard for him), did it all (we have been there before, much easier) and it was up and running. I locked out new friends, so he wouldn't have this incoming mail like you got.

Uninstalled Slowly again for some reason, and then re-installed, this time logging in to his existing account.

And... Hours later, a New penpal message showed in the tablet. What? Yes, reinstalling it did reset the “Accepting Friends” toggle. Something to keep in mind.

Woot ?

On the question of what to do now, for you, let me think out loud, some ideas.

wait for them to arrive, if they are far away from you, a 2 days letter trip, that will slow things down considerably. I always felt that, in my experience it took much longer to get acquainted with people who were in those far locations; but easier to cope in terms of read/write loads.
since you are on the receiving end, you can be a bit selective – and if one or more of those letters are unsatisfactory, I would suggest you could send a short but polite “Thank you, but...” message; a few lines with an explanation that you have a number of tasks, already committed to a number of penpals, etc. Maybe not mention this last one but keep it more generic; life demands – school and part time work, this would be understandable. and is much better than no reply at all (rude, and quite common).
and then reply to the other ones if you managed to weed off one or two or more. But don't open the Long Form cannon just yet – as you might be engaged by one of them, and then it becomes more difficult to cut off if needed. So, keep at a medium size tops.
I sure hope you are not using Slowly in a cell phone? We haven't talked about this, but it's much easier and more enjoyable to use a pc or laptop.
in a pinch, if you don't have one, a tablet (Android or iOS, either works) would still be much better than a phone. My phone is quite nice, has a very sharp display and processor, but the touch screen keyboard is not the same as other devices can give me. I had this idea yesterday, of writing a Blog post on the subject — as an alternative in case a pc or laptop isn't available.

How did we handle Slowly before WEB Mode ?

A good pen pal friend of mine, who I have corresponded with for many months, had a tablet solution – hers being a killer model; an iPad Pro, with a Bluetooth keyboard case. Man, she loved it, and we both had fast correspondence.

This at a time when Slowly Web was something mentioned as an upcoming feature, but no firm Release time frame at all.

I used an Android emulator in my laptop, BlueStacks, under Windows 10, and it was a dream setup too — Full keyboard, large and sharp screen, and all the storage in the laptop ready for keeping photos for sharing, notes, etc. And this, in July 2019 – 2 months at least before Slowly Web appeared in mid-September.

Writing a Blog about this is on my clipboard as a To Do item — I know it will be well received, as most people have NO idea this is possible at all. Coming Soon! :)

And we continued from there.

Talking about Blogs, I thank you for your message, which gave me the head start for today's post — this one, as I think it's prime material too. :)

Hope these help, and that you don't mind my appropriation of this for expanding into a public channel. As usual I will not release any details of my interlocutors. :P

And I will be around and happy to help and chat if you want to continue this topic. Turned into a pretty letter, this one, didn't it ?

Thanks, Little Sister! :)

Have a great day, dear friend.

Yann.

Fast Forward, and this page is Born.

A very agreeable chat, and a great start for my day — with a fresh idea, and motivation to get it into Web Magazine Style which I love so much.

This post is being brought to you by :

The EditPad Lite text editor previously mentioned.
Irfanview Image Editor, a must have piece of my tool kit.
Write.freely blog instance, running in my own laptop as a private instance; the SAME software where my pages go to for Publishing. Instant refreshes, perfect formatting, when a post is complete it's a quick Copy Paste Save to get it Live on the Net. :)
MySQL server, needed to run the Write.Freely package. Free and complicated but once installed, completely stable and forgettable.

Famous Last Words

Special thank you to all the folks behind the SLOWLY app.

Letters we share, with pen pals all over the world. A modern day take in the traditional penpal experience. Come and join us, using SLOWLY.

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