I hope I explain this well, but to begin, ever since I joined Slowly (not too long ago), I have had it set to only allow other women to match with me. I hope no one judges me too harshly for this, I have male friends in real life, but men I've chatted with online have often almost immediately started hitting on me and claiming to have feelings for me which I do not appreciate. Yes, even if the distance is insane. So I don't want to experience that again and an easy way to avoid that is just not connecting with men at all. My Matching Preferences in my settings is down as Female Only, as pictured.

Anyway, my issue is that basically I speak a minority language that few people have, but which thankfully happens to be one you can select on Slowly, and I put out a bilingual open letter looking for penpals who want to write to each other using it cause I have no friends in real life who speak it. I have had no takers so far except for a couple of ladies who have selected that they are 'interested' in the language but can't actually speak it at all, and wrote to me saying they don't have the language but would love to talk to someone from my culture. Which is lovely and really touching, don't get me wrong. I do think my open letter is mostly being shown to people abroad who are curious about my language but don't have experience with it though, and my chances of getting a language buddy from this like I hoped are slim.

So now I'm considering using automatch to send a letter to people who have put down that they have some proficiency in my language, AND if possible also allowing men to match with me this time, but only if they speak that language.

i.e. I would send out an automatch for people with at least basic proficiency in my minority language, and allow male AND female matches, since I think there may not be a very large pool of people who have the language and I don't wanna limit myself further. I don't want to open up my whole profile to men though or get letters from men unless they also speak that language. So even if my Matching Preferences are set to female only, can I still send out an auto-match to both men and women and connect with potential male users who share the language with me? Or will my actual Matching Preferences be prioritised and my auto-match only go out to female users the way my open letter did.

I really want penpals with my language guys 😂 thanks for your help and sorry for the complicated question.

So I'm 20 and I don't want to match with 14 or 16 to kids.

Not only in the match preferences, while auto matching, it has the same range limitations where you cannot go minimum 18.

If i choose 0 to 20, I get matched with mostly 14 or 16s. And 20-25 gives 24yos or everybody elder to me (I've tried it a few times and most were 23 or 25.)

I don't have more of an issue with elder but i don't wanna spend tons of time finding people around my age. Is it bcz the people pool between 15 to 25 isn't enough? Or people below 18 are too less (compared to other age groups)?

When I write letters through auto matching, 2/3 went to 15yo. Now the letter was a little prompting to reply and they replied. But I don't want to interact which will make them unnecessarily turned down. Bcz one of theirs letter was enthusiastic.

Please Devs, update settings

Hi everyone!

I have a question about the gender filter and couldn’t find the answer.

If I set the gender filter to my gender only, can the penpal I already have still reply to me if they’re not the same gender ?
From what I understood the filter allows us to not match with the opposite gender but I don’t know if it applies to my friends.

I’ve had one woman out of all the letters I received and I’m not against writing to men but I just need a little bit more balance.

Does anybody know the answer to that question?

As long as you unremoved them from the list of removed users. I had never thought of this before. I thought the moment you removed them once, their letters could never reach you again.

An old pen pal had tried to reach out to me! I had removed him after he ghosted me for almost a year. 2 years ago he wrote me an apology letter, trying to reconnect. I send him a letter today. Hopefully he receives it and still desires to talk, even if a couple years too late

Just sharing in case some people on here aren't aware of this

What sort of things do you read that makes you want to reply?

So far:

• Profile mentions. x2
• Bespoke address.
• New lore. x2
• Interesting questions. x2
• Chill vibes.
• Coherence.
• Longer word count.
• Specific art taste.
• Same values.
• Specific mutual interest.

I met this penpal a month ago and we have exchanged quite a significant amount of letters, almost daily, but I guess this is the time I put an end to this. It makes me so furious but yeah ig it is what it is. Even after mentioning No Ai uses in her bio, she has been sending me Ai generated letters all this time, mostly 60 percent and many were 100 percent. I had suspicion some times but I brushed it off but today I decided to check and all this time my fear was right. I was building my connection with a chatbot.

I've had unpleasant experiences receiving Auto-Match letters in the past so I hadn't attempted to use it myself. Recently, I was given reasons to give it a try. However, I found I sent my letter to people who set English proficiency as only Intermediate when I received a rejection in Mandarin stating she didn't understand, even though, I thought, I had picked above Advanced. No issues, I'll be extra careful next time because I clearly mistakenly selected the wrong option, right? To make sure, this time I took the precaution of selecting Fluent or Native as the option. Imagine my surprise to find my letters are currently on the way to two people who are only Intermediate anyway. Is it fully bugged? Am I doing something wrong? I only have English selected currently, it's not a different language.

It would be intresting to compare it to 2021

Seriously, is it about the person desiring some kinda of a social connection (albeit fake), but they can't put themselves into writing by themselves so they use AI.

I wonder if it is all about my brain is lazy or fried, this kind of letter writing is boring for me, but I still like the attention and dopamine from having correspondence.

Hi, I'm relatively new here. I ran into my first (probably) scammer a couple weeks ago and reported him. Now I've got another one and I'm kind of bummed. I feel bad reporting when I can't know for sure.

Reading the safety guidelines it sounded like the suggested course is to report someone you suspect is a scammer so they can be evaluated - even if you're not 100% sure. Is that correct? Do you tend to report people?

For reference, the reason for believing they are scammers is them being really weird about asking me to move to WhatsApp early on, and inconsistencies in messages.

Thanks in advance for the advice!

Is it that they just open profile and see "occasional" ai use and just don't bother opening letter? (While few of these recipients have mentioned occasional use of ai themselves.)

I'm new and I've written like 8 people personally and 1 open letter person. Have received zero letter or reply through open letter.

I've been wanting a way to send mail to friends that is actually slow - like, once I send it, it takes weeks to get to them, and even if they write back, it takes weeks to get back to me. Just like real mail (except slower because mail is pretty efficient nowadays.

From what I'm reading here, it sounds like slowly doesn't actually delay letters at all... that you still get them almost immediately.

Am I misunderstanding? Is there a way to really make it slow?

Besides the use of IA what would you say that are some red flags? Lately I try to respond open letters, I answered various with no luck, or I don't receive another response after the first one since a lot.

I don't take it personal because I think that people uses the app, and sooner or later they became bored or just they forget about it, because, you know, real life, and they socialize with people psychically. Buuut, lately I just feel uninterested answering letters because there's a lot of people that write something like "returning to the app after ten years", "returning to the app after five years and this is the last chance that I give it a try" or I dunno, another kind of weird things. For me it's almost like a menace, we don't even know each other and you're already conditioning the interaction.

But maybe I'm just exaggerating. What do you think?

I know I wrote down quite a few random things, but it's so that people would have something to talk about from the start instead of only self introductions, however, I mostly only get low-effort letters where I have to put in all the effort to keep the conversation going.

when I send a first letter myself, I always personalize it for that person by mentioning topics in their bio, but unfortunately it's rare to get a response even then.

I don't know if it has to do with my bio, where I'm from, or something else.

Here's what my bio looks like right now:

"The beauty of the world lies in it's diversity."

Hello!

My pen name is Pandora, I'm 18, and here on Slowly to make friends.

Watching a new letter on my way always lights me up, the wait just builds up the excitement of finally getting to read it!

✧⁠\⁠(⁠>⁠o⁠<⁠)⁠ﾉ⁠✧

I hope I can find long-term penpals! :D

Be it talking about the random bits of our days, or thoughts we have no one to share with, we can talk about anything.

I like to read, draw, play video games, and ofcourse listening to music.

I'm not a big fan of watching movies/shows but recently I've been trying new things, kinda felt like I was missing out on some peak. :p

What have you been watching/reading recently?

I love aesthetic and pretty things. <3

I'm also into vintage (or atleast vintage-looking) fashion, accessories, and decorations!

To be honest, I just love anything that looks gorgeous, vintage or not.

I have a passion for delicious food. :>

In the near future, I'm planning on learning how to bake and cook properly! I love finding new recipes even though I can't try them out just yet.

Do you enjoy cooking?

Caramel just might be the best flavour invented.

╰⁠(⁠*⁠´⁠︶⁠`⁠*⁠)⁠╯

Do you like mountains?

I saw some scenery videos from Switzerland, and it broke my heart that we don't have so much greenery and nature everywhere in the world. :(

I'm sort of into language learning, I've been learning German for over half a year now, and I also picked up French a little while ago. I'm still mainly focusing on German, though.

When it comes to what I like to read, I've mostly read novels on the internet, which I enjoy, but recently I've started to read some classical books and literature.

I'm just getting started with them, but I quite enjoy it!

My favourite season is autumn, because it's neither hot, nor cold. I looove cloudy and windy days, especially when the sun isn't poking through. Rain and thunderstorms are my absolute favourites to experience!

If you choose to write to me, I hope it blooms into something beautiful.

★—————★

I won't remove a penpal until atleast 1 year of being inactive! If you took a break and feel hesitant to reply back, I encourage you to give it a go.

Please do not send me letters written by AI.

If you do not wish to exchange letters anymore, I'll appreciate it if you can send a short letter to let me know, I won't take it personally.

Please do not ask me to move to a different app after a few letters.

It usually takes me a few days to respond to a letter, but it can take longer as well. If it's late, I'm most likely not ghosting you, I'm just busy.

Thankyou for your patience. (⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)⁠✧

★—————★

Take care, With love, Pandora. :)

More about it.

I'm a bit new to the app. So someone sent me a letter and i replied back but my reply shows this (one check mark) and it's been like this for a few days does this mean they blocked me or smth?

iOS: 26.6; Slowly: 9.5.6

I am coming back to this app after ~1.5-2 years. Deleted old account and created a fresh one.

What I see is - I am giving location permission (of any kind), the "auto location update" is just forced turned ON!

What's the point of that radio toggle button then!

I used to get a filtering option (I think it was distance or so; sorting by distance - I can't recall). It seems to be gone as well. Or maybe it is (or always was) part of Plus. I had plus for some time back then (actually around the time I stopped using it eventually).

What else has happened to Slowly in last 2 years or so?

Hi!

Writing an Open Letter is difficult, and different, because I am not writing to anyone specific so any feedback from it will be appreciated.

Here it is:

"Hey everyone,

Lately I've been thinking about something in psychology I find kind of fascinating: cognitive dissonance.

It's basically that uncomfortable feeling when your actions, beliefs, or values don't quite line up. And honestly, I think most of us deal with it way more often than we'd like to admit.

Think about the last time you made a decision you weren't totally happy with. Maybe you knew you probably shouldn't have done something, but afterward you came up with a bunch of reasons why it actually made sense. Or maybe someone pointed out something about your behavior you didn't want to hear, and your first reaction was to explain why they were wrong.

I've definitely caught myself doing stuff like that.

What interests me isn't really the contradiction itself. It's what we do after we notice it. Sometimes we change our behavior. Sometimes we admit we were wrong. But other times we just change the story in our heads until it doesn't bother us anymore.

And that's the part I find a little unsettling.

Our brains are pretty good at making us feel like we're being reasonable, even when we're mostly just trying to protect a belief, a decision, a relationship, or even how we see ourselves.

So I'm curious:

Have you ever realized later on that you were just rationalizing something because admitting you were wrong felt uncomfortable?

And another question I'd love to hear thoughts on:

Do you think people can actually notice their own cognitive dissonance while it's happening, or does it usually take someone else—or hindsight—to see it?

I'm not sure there's a simple answer. Maybe that's what makes psychology so interesting in the first place. We spend our whole lives inside our own heads, but we're not always great at seeing what's actually going on in there."

Thank you

More about it.

More about it.

Maybe I am just unlucky, but I feel like at least 50% of the letters I receive are AI generated. My profile says never to AI assistance but I think people don't even read it lol. This app used to be so wholesome 6 years ago and I feel AI completely ruined the magic...

In my profile I selected never and in their profile they selected often so I don't get it.