On the art of writing letters, prose, poetry, and other long forms. In particular, for communication, small or large.

on the art of writing

Writing long forms is becoming more and more of a lost art each and every single day. And it saddens me by a whole lot, simply because there is something serene and calm about writing a long form prose. Instant messengers are convenient, sure, but oh god are they the antithesis of whatever I'm trying to communicate here!

I would have had a quest for you, if not for the weird nature of this beast called email. Regardless, assuming you use a relatively privacy friendly email, you should do the following.

Write an email to a friend. It could be anyone. Write it. Write a plaintext only email. Take your sweet time, about 30 minutes.

Then, wait. Wait for them to respond. The time it takes for them to respond makes it settle down. In the process, it becomes something meaningful. As if, the very act of taking your time to compose an email and send it to others makes it sit still into a souvenir. As if the time it takes for the other to read your message and respond makes it something special. Something worthy of consideration.

Of course, there's much more to it than just that. Writing helps you clear your head and have a concrete and coherent thought. It travels slowly, often over the course of several days. It's sort of poetic, so to speak (despite the fact that you're writing prose).

The lack of modern "email"

I recently had a pretty good discussion on the lack of secure communication infra around long form prose on the fediverse. Deltachat's official account echoed the sentiments as well in the replies, and there was some really good discussion by all of us involved. I'd admit though, the user base of such a thing would be pretty low, so to speak.

Regardless, the primary issue has been solved to some extent by protonmail, but then it locks everything up in the paid tier, and I'm broke as a joke, and I don't want to pay for it either.

I've had long thoughts on how people can possibly use secure E2EE to communicate The most obvious ideas to me are to use some existing decentralized infrastructure and send that media across. We have candidates: atproto, activitypub, and whatnot.

Perhaps I'll write such a tool that can do that. I feel like that would be really cool, and it would scratch an itch for me really. Traditional email is a lost cause, but long form prose, a digital letter to a penpal, should stay.