User Experience

All services should offer users notifications on their platform of choice

Instead of defaulting to email or SMS, let people choose Telegram or some other dedicated message app depending on how they categorize communication

Interested in social infrastructure | slowly building /firstdraft, curating /concretejungle | markfishman.xyz

Hmm... how about users just set up email filters? That gives control to the users, and lets them have a centralized configuration, rather than preferences that are scattered over all the apps, and have a different format everywhere.

For Gmail, filters can also mark messages as important, so users get a notification.

Freelance software engineer, developing https://healthlearn.org, altruist, learner

I try to set up filters in email, but this usually requires me doing the work after I receive the first message. I'd like to be able to choose the "filter" right at the time of sign up

The project that I work on allows people to sign up using WhatsApp or SMS. Is that what you mean?

For our target audience, WhatsApp is the most commonly available channel. For the project, it provides a bit of protection against bot accounts.

That said, it's a bit expensive (each OTP code costs a few cents to send). Each supported channel requires separate code and yet another third party dependency... I can understand why apps offer few options.

Yeah, Twilio helps a bit, and works if you stick to the most basic features.

It's still far from seamless though. For example, for most WhatsApp uses you have to get a a WhatsApp business account, define templates for all your message types, get them approved... Then there are incoming messages, delivery status changes, images, reactions, etc... of course all this is near impossible to test locally, so you just put lots of logging on your production webhooks and hope for the best.

Now imagine adding something quite different, like Email or login with Farcaster. Then all your hopes of a unified API go pouff 💥

Yeah WhatsApp is a great example of a different channel that meets users where they are.

Maybe there’s an opportunity for some third party (Twilio?) to seamlessly offer all of the different options for developers