Frequently Asked Questions

A “Round Robin” was an old-fashioned way for a family (or any other group living far apart) to keep in touch in the days before social media, email, or even cheap long-distance calls. It was basically a packet full of letters that was sequentially mailed to each person in “the Robin”.

When someone received the Robin, they would remove the letter they had included last time they had it, write a new letter talking about developments in their life, then add the new letter to the packet and send it on to the next person on the list. After the last person, it would be sent back to the first person, and a new “flight” of the Robin would begin.

RobinLetter replicates the Round Robin experience in a modern way appropriate to the internet age via your phone or your computer, while retaining the structure, incentives, and charm of the original.

The focus is on periodic thoughtful updates to small circles of people who care how each other are doing, rather than posting to a wide group or even to the entire world.

The key ideas are that specific people are included in a Robin, in a specific order, and they take turns providing updates for the Robin. When it is your turn, you write an update to share with the group. One full pass through everyone in the Robin is called a flight; after the last person it wraps back to the first person and a new flight begins.

RobinLetter works best for groups of 5-15 people who know each other, not just you, and who want to keep in touch, but aren't already doing so regularly in other ways. Groups like extended family, friends who have moved apart, or former coworkers you were close with tend to succeed.

Beyond those classic use cases, RobinLetter could also work for groups built around shared interests or activities — book clubs, hobby groups, alumni circles, collaborative storytelling, class assignments, or similar. If the turn-based structure resonates, experiment and give it a try!

Look, if you have a group chat with all your uncles and aunts and cousins and siblings, and it is hopping, and you all know about what is going on with each other anyway, then you probably don't need RobinLetter for this. And there are people in our lives that are so active on social media you always know what is going on with them if you want to or not.

But there are many people in most of our lives where we would like to know what they are up to, and where we would like them to know what we are up to, but it just does not happen spontaneously.

When was the last time you actually heard from Cousin Fred?

This is where RobinLetter can help. It provides a structured way to get updates and give updates from those people regularly, and just gives that extra little nudge to make it actually happen.

Participating in Robins is free. So is inviting up to 10 people to join Robins you create or are a member of. Additional invites beyond that will become available as a paid option in the future — both to help cover the cost of running this site and to discourage people from using RobinLetter to spam their entire contact lists. Other premium features such as photo uploads will also be added over time.

Photos are often a key part of how we communicate with each other and I want to include them. They aren't in the current version, which is focused on text updates, but photo uploads will be added as a premium feature in a later update.

This will depend on the specific Robin(s) you are included in. A Robin with only two people in it might go back and forth pretty quickly. A Robin with 20 people in it might only come around to your turn every couple of months. Some Robins may have lots of people who respond immediately as soon as it is their turn, while others may have people who wait a week before they submit an update. So your mileage will vary depending on the Robins you are a part of.

This is different for different Robins, as it's something that can be set up by the creator. But generally speaking, when it's your turn you have a certain amount of time to provide an update (default one week), or the Robin passes along to the next person leaving no update from you in that flight.

If you miss a certain number of flights in a row (default 3, also configurable per Robin) you'll be moved to inactive mode, where you still have access to view updates, but won't be invited to contribute again until you indicate you'd like to get back in the rotation (which you can do at any time). You're not actually “kicked out” — you just won't hold up the Robins for everybody else until you're ready to participate again.

That's the whole point. Users can create Robins and invite whoever they like to those Robins. You can create different Robins for different groups of people in your life as well.

Currently RobinLetter allows any member of a Robin to invite additional people to that Robin, not just the creator. Over time, this may end up causing problems if people get added who misbehave, or are simply unwanted by some of the existing Robin members. Additional features for moderation and suspension of problematic users will be added as the site grows.

Absolutely.

RobinLetter runs in any modern browser, so it works on phones, tablets, and computers right away. Native mobile apps are on the roadmap but I don't have a timeline yet.