You write 280 characters onto a tasteful kraft postcard. Around the time you’d be re-reading old texts anyway.
Write tonight. A stranger reads it tomorrow morning. One postcard a day, slow on purpose.
Daily stranger correspondence. Today’s postcard arrives tomorrow morning, written by one of our founding correspondents.
You have something to say at 11pm.
The notes-app journal nobody reads. The group-chat thought you draft and never send. The friend whose newsletter you read every Sunday and have never once replied to.
You want to be read once a day, by one human, slowly — without a thread, without DMs, without follow-up. You want correspondence, not conversation.
That’s what this is.
Three sentences. One postcard. Once a day.
One stranger somewhere reads what you wrote. Their postcard lands in your inbox the same morning.
No thread. No reply window. No notifications. Your postcard text is deleted from our database in 24 hours. The next one is tomorrow.
Because nothing else is slow anymore.
Feeds compress feeling into reactions. DMs invite obligation. Every other app you opened today asked you to perform.
Postcards are the opposite of that. One a day, written for one person you’ll never meet, read once and then deleted. The friction is the point. The wait is the product.
If you kept a Letterboxd diary, subscribed to Letters of Note, screenshotted lyrics into a Notes folder no one will ever see — this is for you.
9,142 postcards mailed. 318 sent this morning.
A few we’ve passed along recently. Names stay where they were.
A few honest answers.
- Is the stranger who reads it a real person?
- Yes — and right now, while the community is small, today’s postcard may come from one of our founding correspondents: writers we’ve paid honoraria to seed the early days. Once enough of you are writing, theirs quietly retire. We will not pretend the room is full when it isn’t.
- Who reads what I write?
- One person. Once. Tomorrow morning, in their local 7–9am window. There is no second reader, no inbox triage, no human moderator skimming for content unless a safety tripwire fires (see below).
- What happens to my postcard after that?
- The text of your postcard is deleted from our database within 24 hours. Hosting and email partners keep delivery metadata on their own schedules — Resend ~30 days, Postmark 45 days, Vercel/Cloudflare plan-tier-dependent. We name all of them in the privacy notice. We don’t claim to purge what we can’t actually purge.
- Why is there a delay? Why not just send it now?
- Because the delay is the product. You write at the time of day you have something to say. They read at the time of day they’re ready to receive. Both of you got the version of correspondence the feeds took away.
- Can I reply to a postcard I receive?
- No. That would be a thread, and threads are the thing this isn’t. Tomorrow you write a new one to a new person.
- Can I send a postcard to someone specific?
- Not at launch. That’s a letter, and letters need consent on both ends and a longer trust posture than we’ve built yet. For now, you can pay $15 to have today’s postcard printed on real cardstock and mailed to your own address as a keepsake — sender-to-self only.
- What if what I write is heavier than I meant it to be?
- If your postcard contains crisis language, we don’t pass it to a stranger. We replace it with a card pointing to people trained to answer: 988 (US), Samaritans 116 123 (UK), Befrienders International. You see that confirmation at the moment you submit, not the next morning.
- How old do I have to be?
- 18+. Right now we’re US-only at the edge; UK and EU readers see a polite hold message until we’ve finished the age-assurance and DPIA work the law there asks for.
Write one. See what happens tomorrow.
280 characters. Tonight. One stranger reads it in the morning. Then nothing.
One postcard a day. Slow on purpose.
