Hey there HN – I'm Mohamed, CEO here at Posterity.<p>I've seen a lot of threads lately discussing how stuff can be transferred safely to significant others and spouses. A key aspect of that transfer is often timing, and the ability to only disclose information if and when necessary.<p>This is basically what Automations are about; web-hooks triggered in the event something happens, and which can serve as a reliable signal because we verify every death manually.<p>Today, it's available via IFTTT (<a href="https://ifttt.com/posterity" rel="nofollow">https://ifttt.com/posterity</a>), and we'll be launching standard HTTP web-hooks very soon as a follow up.<p>Hope you find this useful.
This is really interesting. The site is very beautiful! I'm curious: let's say I'm 30 years old. How can I be sure that 'posterity.life' will be around if I live a full and long life. A _lot_ can change in fifty years.<p>This seems like an obvious concern and I don't see it covered in your FAQ. This is not hypothetical. There are many similar (not identical) services that are no more. See SafeBeyond for one such example.<p>What do you say to folks who wonder about whether their lives will be longer than that of this site?
> Free 15-day trial, then $29.99/year<p>Time to start taking those big risks I always wanted to take. There are some real savings here if I manage to die in the next two weeks, plus I can still keep getting things done!<p>Will I need to keep paying to keep getting things done after I die? Can posterity automate that too? How can I cancel my service after death if it fails to deliver, or say, I, as a ghost become dissatisfied with it?
My mom was a hippie, and she always promised me that after she died she'd figure out a way to tell me what it's like. I was in prison when she passed. Leading up to that first holidays after she passed sucked. Thanksgiving, horrible. Four months after her death, and approaching Xmas, I get a package at mail call. WTF? All of my family/friends had fallen off, so by that point it was only my mom who had still sent me letters. I open it, and it was a book on 'what the afterlife might look like'. She had figured out how to keep her word, and let me know what it was like after her passing. I don't know how it got shipped it came as an Amazon gift but with no identifying info. Her last 6 months she wasn't in a state to arrange anything, so she would have had to plan this like 10 months earlier. But having this gift, that was also an inside running kind of joke between us, oh man, that was so friggen awesome.<p>I'm not doing great myself, and my boy just won't take it serious so we can communicate stuff so this will be super helpful. I have probably thousands of dollars just in re-sellable music software licenses that I need a way to communicate to him, and I can't even get him to bookmark a shared Google doc (funny how relationships go when you completely and utterly fail people and betray them by going to prison).
This is probably a product of my current mindset, but I find the tagline "Get things done from the afterlife" hilariously grim - not only should I be obsessed with "getting things done" while I'm alive, but now I need to be productive after I die!<p>edit: I should add that I actually like this idea, and I'll check it out further.
Talk about testing in production. You have to die first to see if this triggers, and if not -- your automation becomes the ultimate in legacy code.<p>Seriously, this is a very interesting idea. However, after losing both of my parents in the last 4 years, there's a sad but legitimate intermediate state between alive & well, and deceased. People lose their ability to function and make decisions on their own, might not be able to renew your service.
I used to really like IFTTT. They changed. They turned off stuff that used to work and added different licenses.<p>I would never rely on IFTTT to work in 5 years, much less 50.<p>This is a neat idea, but it doesn’t seem like it will work when I really need it to.
Some services already have similar features that triggers on inactivity or death:<p><a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en</a><p><a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212360" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212360</a><p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/help/103897939701143</a>
Manual action needed to begin the process<p>> We rely on a user’s circle of trusted contacts to let us know if something happened to them. It can be anyone they invited or nominated for a role on their account.
The Law And Order episode "Rapture" is about a web site that automatically sends out its client's pre-written confessional and gloating emails after the Rapture takes place, which it cleverly detects when the two owners don't check in after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately they both die due to other less supernatural circumstances, the emails are triggered prematurely, and all hell breaks loose!<p><a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/LawAndOrderS19E14Rapture" rel="nofollow">https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/LawAndOrderS19E...</a><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343619/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343619/</a>
Interesting idea, although I'm not sure it's more effective than drafting a will and including the same information about passwords etc. - which is admittedly more difficult for non-technical users.<p>How do you hedge against the risk of people using your service to commit posthumous crimes?
I worked with an Estate Attorney on a similar product that was geared towards shutting down other online services. We started down the path of trying to figure out which services would let loved ones assume ownership vs which would only let you deactivate the account and there were a lot of headaches along the way.<p>The service eventually launched, but it never got much transaction. I believe the Attorney tried to get investors at one point to fund marketing and advertising and everyone felt like it was a good idea, but was worried about adoption. The funding never came and the service was shuttered.<p>I still think it's a good idea if executed properly. Will have to give this a look.
I would like to pass along my master password and safe combination, but those would allow an attacker to help themselves to most of my estate. Is there a way to do that with your service that you feel includes sufficient security?
I'd pay for the service that would post to my Facebook/Vkontakte/Telegram accounts afterlife.<p>IFTTT is not very reliable IMO, since you can't control the tech once you dead. But if you have a script that human needs to follow whatever what, then it can convince me.<p>Moreover, if the service periodically reminds me to write something to be posted later, it would probably work very well.<p>In other words, my digital life is not around IFTTT, until IFTTT can guarantee on their side that everything is going to work as expected
The “bring your own code” part is interesting, but what happens if there is a mistake in my code that causes one or more of my automations to fail to run? How do you ensure that user created code is in a functional state so that the purpose of the service is fully executed? If my code breaks and I’m dead, then some potentially very important (to me) stuff doesn’t happen?
This is a brilliant idea, and terrifying experiment, in finding out what people were harbouring to their deaths, and how they wanted to project back into the future some material change. Most of it will be to cause harm, and some of it will be so beautiful as to make tolerating the human smallness of the rest of it worthwhile, or so I'd venture.
Excuse the harsh question, but how many people using this have actually died yet? As far as we know, you could just collect money and never trigger anything. It's also very hard to collect reviews for this service. I love the idea and I would like to have it, but I find it a hard sell to actually rely on it.
This kind of product/service is launched every few years, but unless users hurry they find they typically outlive them. It would be very interesting to see a post-mortem of the various "schedule stuff to happen after you die" projects, at least one of which I believe was YC funded.
Love the idea ( played with similar concept, but could not push it past the design stage ) and the approach ( manual verification as opposed to say.. automatic email check ). I think you did the right way. Good luck!
Is this a one time trigger, or can you, for instance, periodically continue to annoy some folks by sending them a message or a photo? If, periodically, how does billing work then?
An answer I didn't see in the FAQ: why should someone rely on a tech startup to exist and function correctly after their death, for something important, usually decades later?
Tech has changed _a lot_ over the past few decades. Auth tokens expire. I'd be interested to hear how you're planning to future proof your solution.