Postcrossing is a project created for the possibility of receiving postcards from all over the world
Postcrossing is a kind of social network for those who like to send and receive postcards by mail. The user is invited to register on the website postcrossing.com, tell about themselves and their interests, provide their mailing address and the languages they speak. Usually international correspondence is in English, and correspondence within the country is in the local language. However, the user can set a ban on sending and receiving postcards from their own country.
When a registered user wants to send a postcard, they click the "Send a postcard" button and see the profile of the person to whom they should send the message. It is considered good form to send not the first card that comes to hand, but something that matches the recipient's interests. Preferably with a good stamp and without an envelope. Most often they ask for postcards with city views, depicting national customs, with lighthouses, owls and children. There are also rarer interests: airplanes, trains, cacti, crocodiles, and so on.
When the sent postcard reaches the recipient, they register it in the system. After that, the sender becomes the recipient of a new postcard – their address is given to another random user. This maintains a balance: as many postcards as you sent, as many you received.
New users are allowed to send up to five postcards at a time. Gradually this number increases. The most popular postcrossing user, German Wilhelm Jansen from East Frisia, has sent about 30 thousand postcards. In the top ten users of the site, six lines are occupied by senders from Germany, there are also three from Ireland and a resident of Finland.
Germans firmly hold first place in the number of postcards sent in the project. Over 15 years, about 9 million postcards have been sent from the hands of 55 thousand German postcrossers. In second place in the number of postcards sent is Russia. Next come the USA, the Netherlands, Finland, Taiwan, China, Belarus, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
Usually postcrossing is more popular in those countries where postal services are more accessible and of higher quality. For example, in Germany it is the golden mean: a postcard within the country from one recipient to another usually arrives in three days, and its postage costs only 60 cents. Germany might have been overtaken by Russia (where there are twice as many registered users, and the tariff is three times lower than the German one), but the local post office usually needs at least a week to deliver a card even between neighboring cities. International mail from Russia to Europe usually takes up to two weeks, and to China and the USA it can be delayed for months.
The EU countries with the most expensive tariffs for international postage are Austria, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Kosovo and Denmark. On the pages of users from these countries, you can often see heartbreaking messages that they send postcards in batches when they visit friends abroad.