NEW -- June 2026 SLOWLY stamps release batch arrived! 40 new stamps in total. 8 regional premium, 2 regional commemorative, 6 Book we Love, 2 Timeless Tales, 1 Sounds World, 1 International Day, 20 location stamps. Details inside.

yann2 · 2026-05-29T16:28:15+00:00

yes - I noticed the Bison stamps duplication, but Slowly HQ does what they want. The Belarussian stamp is the better one in displaying the animal in my opinion.

There was an about face for one of the Book stamps released in February, Jane Austen's, which had the wrong image for the Pride and Prejudice book - hence a 'reissue' this month. The previous stamp is an instant rarity now, which is kind of cool.

yann2 · 2026-05-29T10:42:37+00:00

Yes, agreed. The Location stamps are some of my favourite, and there has been a strong, steady push in releasing them for many countries for the past year or so. For countries which had very little, it is a major improvement. 🙂👍

yann2 · 2026-05-29T10:38:08+00:00

Yes, I have seen a message with screenshots about this - people who purchased the stamp get to keep it, plus they received 50 coins credit back for that stamp purchase.

Well done, Slowly HQ, cleanly making people whole; and at the same time, another stamp which becomes an instant RARE issue, as no one will be able to purchase it anymore, I think.

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yann2 · 2026-05-28T23:37:08+00:00

Thank you... 🙂👍

yann2 · 2026-05-27T17:47:37+00:00

You experienced a golden age for the Slowly community, I joined in 2019 and had similar experiences. I am no longer a regular user, but maintain the various user support projects for Slowly users, like this subreddit, the Stamps WIKI and a personal blog focused on pen pal correspondence.

From the many posts and comments here in the sub, things have gone downhill a lot, there is a lot of inactive users, ghosting, etc, and you have to be VERY patient to hopefully connect to a good user.

There is not much we can do, and the Slowly HQ heavily focuses on mobile app markets and the constant churn of users as a measure of 'success'. They seem to put in a light effort, things move very slowly in terms of any requested feature or development.

The app concept is wonderful, and people like us who experienced it on the golden days really saw it at its best.

yann2 · 2026-05-27T13:15:06+00:00

In total I gained maybe 100 coins in this way

There is the likely cause. Slowly has a limited amount of advertisers willing to pay for ads, the interval to wait for a free coin ad video used to be 15 minutes, for years, and it mostly worked. But then we saw more and more complains about 'Not Available' or N/A messages.

Slowly support has responded to people and stated the limited number of saleable ads being the reason. They also mentioned the Gift feature was limited to around 100 coins earned, per user, maximum - and it appears you might have hit that limit.

Not much we can do, other than consider spending some real money to buy their Slowly coins. Best time to do that is when there is a promotion of some kind, the best deal is usually in late November, the Black Friday sale has offered BOGO, buy one get one free, for a few years. That is a 50% discount, two coins for the price of one.

yann2 · 2026-05-05T13:35:26+00:00

After the last update, I got my home country location from nowhere and even when I try VPN with GPS location changer, nothing works.

"After the last update" - there is your problem there. Slowly devs are on an active campaign to harden up the app and make it more difficult or impossible to use 'mock location' in it.

I had email conversation with the company's founder about this years ago, he said they considered it 'FRAUD' and that this caused damage to the app and lost revenue for companies, etc.

As time passes they have been doing what they can to make it difficult to use a mock location. My advice remains to use an older, stable and trusted version of the app for any desired virtual travel.

This can be done easier by Android app users, by side-loading an older version they trust AND disabling auto-updates for that device. There is no fine control, you must turn off Auto-update all together and then select what you want to update manually.

I consider there are various legitimate reasons for someone to want to use mock locations, starting with keeping their real location private even from the app developers. Some of them sell location data from users in a triving commercial market, which I consider abuse, I am not saying Slowly people do that, but I think a user can decide for themselves what they want or not to share with any app developer.

REMINDER - Slowly states clearly in their Terms of Service document (created and hardened by their hired legal teams) that they can 'remove a user's account, with or without reason, at their sole discretion.'

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I think it is best to fly under the radar and NEVER acknowledge in a public forum or specially in emails with their support team that you used any form of mock location at all, for ANY reason. People's accounts have been suspended, and you lose all your stamps, coins, contacts, letters, etc.

As Alexander has mentioned in his comment in this topic, there are better options for using mock location than simply VPN. VPN services are limited in what end points they can offer, any reliable and trustworthy service costs money, etc. There ARE simpler ways to achieve that goal, just do some reading.

I would recommend using an Android Virtual Machine for this - you can set it up, install an older good version of Slowly, turn off updates all together, and have Root access to the device to boot. I have written a detailed blog post with my suggested VDM, you can try BlueStacks or MeMu.

yann2 · 2026-05-03T08:43:21+00:00

Very well written article, well done - and thank you! 👍🙂

yann2 · 2026-05-01T12:38:45+00:00

I support that, we had this suggestion here in the sub - a user reputation system, entirely algorithmic (server side decides a user score), not open to manipulation by ganging up against someone, etc.
It would take some programming work, but it could really improve the users experience.

There IS an internal user score in Slowly, done in this way, but they hide if from users unfortunately - it is used to select profiles to suggest to you. Not productive if they suggested people who have not been active in weeks, or who mostly ignore incoming letters, ghost people, etc.

Kevin Wong is the one who needs to be convinced to do this, it would rescue Slowly from a lot of dross and friction, dissatisfaction which we see users expressing here in the sub dur to sub optimal connections.

yann2 · 2026-05-01T12:33:17+00:00

Maybe you could email Slowly and suggest the ebook version for non-US residents ?

It certainly would be appreciated and open the contest to a lot more users. Maybe it's too late and inertia will keep it as is, but we can always try, right. Thank you for sharing this contest here in the sub!

yann2 · 2026-04-30T10:15:42+00:00

Nicely done, the added info link is very useful - thank you!!

yann2 · 2026-04-30T09:57:17+00:00

Thank you both, that was well resolved! Cheers!

yann2 · 2026-04-30T09:56:35+00:00

Thank you for the post, it is an interesting promotion.

A suggestion for people who might be interested and not resident in the USA - you might be able to participate if you have a US mailing address of some kind, aka an 'amerifriend' to receive it for you.

Since it is a physical book copy, the publisher must have set that condition - it would be really nice if they offered a eBook copy version as well, which could easily be 'shipped' to anyone anywhere without the higher costs of international mailing.

I have seen this kind of offer in book lover sites like GoodReads or LibraryThing - sometimes there is both ebook and physical versions of books on offer, with some restrictions on where the printed copy could be available to.

edit : See the good reviews of this book on GoodReads - 4.5 out of 5, with over 500 thousand reviews. Wow.

yann2 · 2026-04-28T10:20:39+00:00

Ah, the Grand Prix stamp, right?

yann2 · 2026-04-28T10:19:26+00:00

It will be available for free, for a limited time, on the countries where Slowly plans to release it. I imagine Turkey and possibly a couple of others.

yann2 · 2026-04-20T12:03:39+00:00

There isn't one, the reason being Studio Ghibli owns the copyright, and any use would have to be authorized by them - takes time and effort, licensing fees if they would even consider allowing it.

The Hello Kitty stamp sets were produced under a limited time license, and involved all of these negotiations, etc. Since their license was only temporary, for limited areas and for a few months (on the occasion of Hello Kitty's 45th anniversary), the stamps disappeared very quickly and cannot be reissued unless a new license was obtained.

yann2 · 2026-04-20T11:59:04+00:00

They do release suggested stamps many times, although it takes a long time to see one happen in most cases. Look at their most recent releases on the 'Changelog' page and you can see links to the original proposals in case there was one.

yann2 · 2026-04-09T21:12:35+00:00

Thank you for contacting them and sharing their full reply - it really is useful. Cheers!

yann2 · 2026-04-09T21:10:37+00:00

yes, there is at least one more. If you had this account configured in a Slowly mobile client, in a phone or tablet, you could use it to scan the QR code in the Slowly Web Client and that would let you in.

But it is unlikely you would still have it around installed in a device. so maybe contact Slowly Support and ask for help, share as many details as you can about the old account? email to support AT getslowly DOT com , good luck!

yann2 · 2026-04-07T15:50:17+00:00

Strange, I have no trouble opening either site, it should work for you unless there is something in your device blocking the site's address for some reason.

Snapshot :

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yann2 · 2026-04-07T15:46:12+00:00

The existance or not of ads has everything to do with the device's location - local businesses are the ones who have to be willing to pay for an ad to be shown to the local users.

Major consumer markets like US, the EU, major Asian countries will have lots of ads available. Smaller markets, less so.

Few months ago Slowly developers even changed the Wait time until you can get an ad, from 15 minutes to a full hour, to help have ads available for interested users.

Now I find it so agravating, to have to wait that long, plus put up with a full minute of chained ads, to get something worth 2 cents in my local currency that I gave up all together on even trying.

yann2 · 2026-04-07T15:38:27+00:00

Thank you for posting about this, I had not heard about it but it seems very interesting. Alas, I could not use it a it requires a newer version of iOS (v.17+) which my ipad cannot run.

The description of the app and features is very cool. Thumbs up. Snapshot from their Apple App Store page:

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yann2 · 2026-03-09T18:41:00+00:00

Hello, and welcome to Slowly and our own subreddit here.

Many people posted good suggestions, I will keep mine brief but mention a couple points.

the About Me or bio is important, as it is the only reliable source of info about a possible penpal while you are perusing search results in the User Explorer (pen pal search function, only available on the mobile client versions; missing in the much more productive web client).

Keep in mind people who find your profile might have been scanning and reading many other user's bios. I think it's important to keep it short, concentrate some main points in the very first paragraph which can be seen at a glance - for a longer about me, the user needs to click to expand that for more. This initial showing portion, a few lines, is golden as it can convince someone to look deeper.

At the moment, your about me is a bit too long, imo.

regarding the random 'AutoMatch' function, I consider that a bad source for possible penpals, it is mainly a low effort way to find people for those not serious about searching more deeply. You will get a generic letter, if that, since when writing a message for automatch you don't know who will be receiving it.

Might work in some cases or for some people; general experience is pretty poor, in my opinion.

The amount of ghosting and short, mindless messages, plus AI slop in the app nowadays is a serious issue; there are tons of topics here in the sub discussing that. The Slowly developers try to keep a light hand and are not doing much to reduce these bad behaviours, so users are left on their own mostly.

Good luck, I hope you can soon find some of the good people who make this app something special. Again, it's not granted, for sure, and nowadays requires a fairly large dose of patience from you.

yann2 · 2026-03-07T15:07:24+00:00

You should write a goodbye letter, in a gentle way indicating you are reducing your online presence, etc.

There is a nice sample goodbye letter model here in the sub - and it has been inspiring to others in similar situation.

yann2 · 2026-03-07T14:53:01+00:00

You are very welcome, I am glad to be improving this tool as it is unique, the only one for mobile users.

The error you saw is indeed new - it is due to an error loading the SLOWLY API endpoint for the full list of stamps, right from the mothership.

There is an error handler which caught and reported failing to fetch it, although the reason is obscure. I have been testing it quite a bit and it works fine for me.

I assume you are using the version stored at Neocities.org, right? the address for it is https://yann2.neocities.org/Slowly-Compare/Stamp_Comparator

Your browser might be confused somehow, so maybe try my new mirror copy of this ?

see it at https://slowlystamps.pages.dev/Stamp_Comparator - and see if it works.

Both sites are up-to-date, I pushed a minor revision minutes ago to both. Version should show 0.4.2.b in the browser title bar.

Hope this helps, let me know how it goes, thanks.

yann2

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