Hi all!
Two of my real-life acquaintances are Postcrossers as well. We often chat about our received and sent postcards privately, and I’m interested in their activity as well. I regularly go check their profiles to see the cards that they’ve recently received. This made me think how nice it would be if there was an easier option for this: being able to add other users as your friends (of course, these could also be forum users you’re close with, not necessarily people you know in real), and having a small feed on your home screen to see what they’ve been up to. I made a quick edit, using the usernames of who I would add as friends, to show what this could look like in my idea.
My personal opinion is that this function doesn’t make much sense on the official website, because Postcrossing is designed for one-way contacts. You send a card to one person, you get a card from another person. It’s not designed to build a network of friends. And many people like it that way, as it’s more anonymous, doesn’t create pressure or competition. Those who like to use Postcrossing as a social network join the forum.
Of course I return to certain profiles too, mainly because we’ve become penpals, or regularly exchange cards via the forum, and I want to check their walls, find their Flickr pages and so on.
At the forum we build member networks, so here the function would make sense to find your regulars quicker.
Edit: But as I don’t have a Facebook account and I’m not a fan of being followed around or being linked to people I don’t feel close to, I wouldn’t vote for this suggestion
I don’t like the idea of having people controlling my activity. Facebook is already a big problem for me and I need to bear with that in behalf of close friends and family. On Tiktok I don’t accept following requests, only the idea of someone (normally a totally unknown person) checking what I’m doing is appalling for me. So, for me no, thanks!
(To clarify a bit, I’m not “associal” it’s because I live in Italy and here it’s very hard to trace a line in “personal space” everybody wants to know what you are doing when and why. And they feel authorized to give their opinion and to ask explanation about everything you do. So, when I found a personal space like Postcrossing I’m trying to keep that as much private as possible! )
Maybe it’s an idea to start a WhatsApp group through the forum? Because, when you are a forum member it’s quite easy to send a personal message to another member. Or start a ‘friends’ topic from which you create a group on WhatsApp.
But… I don’t want Postcrossing to be something like Facebook. I really don’t like that kind of social media.
When you keep it within WhatsApp, it still has a more private character.
On the old forum there was a topic where people could search for friends via whatsapp or instagram etc. .
Members seeking friendship with others wrote their email address, instagram account, etc. here.
To be honest, one of the things I really like about the Postcrossing Forum is that there isn’t a Friend or Followers/Following function like on FB/Twitter/Instagram. There’s a lot of pressure & having to be careful around those functions on social media sites that is not present here (who’s a friend?, who’s not?, who got forgotten, why didn’t X friend me? etc) - Hurray!
I think people can find ways to keep track of people without any direct help (see suggestions below) - we’re a relatively small & very friendly community really as online sites go.
And I hope those features don’t get added as I think it would really change the atmosphere & community built on here.
There’s some good suggestions on how people keep track of particular folks here:
Already the “mute/ignore” function causes not good feelings and is not wanted to happen, so I can imagine another platform or means to show who are your friends (and who not) makes things even more segregated.
