I was trying to research the prices of various countries postage online (I have a habit of sending myself a postcard from overseas) and discovered Postcrossing by chance, here I am four years later.
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I’ve been a postcrosser for a few years (joined in 2018) and I’ve forgotten how I discovered this site. It may have been I did a search for pen pals and Postcrossing appeared. I had recently lost a couple of pen pals and was looking to write to new pen pals. I enjoy postcrossing very much and I’ve found pen pals too.
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I discovered Postcrossing through an article in the “Apotheken Umschau”. It’s a magazine that you can get for free in your pharmacy in Germany.
There was a tiny article about Postcrossing in the back of the magazine, so I was lucky to even find it!
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The answer to this question for me is lost to the mysteries of time. I joined in 2011, either before or after I was doing a lot of other mail art stuff.
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I am in a FB group for the Conqueror Challenge and someone had suggested to do a group postcard exchange.
In the replies someone had mentioned Postcrossing.
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I watched the TV and I had seen the TV show with postcrossing!
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I can’t remember for sure, but I think it was connected to Bookcrossing. I think that site is pretty well dead now, but I was very active in it for a while and I think they may have links to similar sites and I think PC was one of them.
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No, bookcrossing.com is working.
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I was active there, too. I think what she meant is that the site used to be very busy, but now there is not much happening.
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@RalfH @Johnk60 Yes that’s what I mean. The site is technically still going but I think not very many people use it anymore.
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Yes, the number of active users has reduced, but they are still nice, st least in the German section of the forum.
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A friend of a friend posted a picture on Facebook of a card they received and how much they loved it which piqued my curiosity. He helped me on my post crossing journey and here I am almost a year later loving this hobby.
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I work as a tutor and one of my students told me about Postcrossing. Usually students hear about PC from their teachers but in my case it was the other way round and I am a teacher who heard about it from a student, ha ha 
That student of mine was very enthusiastic about the whole thing and since I and my family had always sent postcards to our relatives and friends, I thought that it might be something for me and decided to give it a try. It was over 10 years ago and I’m still in love with this wonderful idea and the people who create this lovely community 
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I imagine I have a bit unusal story: I was working the mail sorting machine at my logistics centre during night shift. That’s the time when national and (most) international mail is processed to be forwarded to the next minor centre and single customer at the end (it’s the reverse during the day/evening, from customer to mailbox/-office to centre to (hopefully right) region).
Anyway, I was feeding the machine and saw postcards from not-the-classic-where-many-Austrians-go-countries, like BY or TW or FI). After a few shifts, I dared to take a closer look at some of the cards, and I saw the various IDs and stickers and ‘happy postcrossing’.
A few day later, I checked out the webpage, a few weeks later I joined.
That was 3444 days ago. Hurray
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I too have an unusual story to tell:
Last spring, I was having dififculty in recruiting participants for my Ukraine project (2022, 2023) from around the world on The Stamp Forum I frequented, when the maxicard creator and collector @Dorinco recommended me checking out Postcrossing. At first I thought we needed to be engaged in sending/receiving a certain number of postcards in order to join the forum, so I didn’t sign up right away (I didn’t have the time for that). Later in August, I realised there was no such requirement for posting on the forum. So I signed up, started a thread, and was able to recruit participants from every country I was looking for within 2 weeks. This is such a vibrant community!
I have always had the habbit of buying / writing postcards during my trips for my friends, when schedule is tight and time is wanting, but in my stationary life I tend to prefer writing long letters that allow developing ideas in depth, therefore knowing each other better. At first I was quite skeptical to the idea of sending postcards to total strangers, as there was virtually nothing profound that can be said on so limited a space as the address side of a postcard. But I soon realised that for someone who has always had difficulty summarising things, it’s the best activity to practice saying the maximal amount of things using the minimal amount of expression. So here I stay, looking to improve my ‘official’ Postcrossing digits (to my defense, I have sent more cards in forum giveaway activities than through official Postcrossing).
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I heard my two university classmates talking about postcrossing between themselves, so I googled it and liked the idea.
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I don’t remember how I found out about it, but I joined 2 January 2011 so maybe there was an article about hobbies to try in the new year? 
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I’m glad!
What an excellent topic. 
For me, it started out with wanting to find a way to use my fountain pens (then a new hobby) more, so I became interested in correspondence generally. From there, I found the Letter Writers Alliance (now closed, alas), which in turn got me interested in all things mail-related – stamps (both postal and ink), stickers, and so forth. An interest in stamps got me following Graham Beck, since of course philately is its own rabbit hole.
I enjoyed writing letters, but often, there’s something intimidating about an entire blank page – so I started sending postcards, which requires less creativity, and even if you write something boring, there’s at least a picture on the other side. Postcards rapidly became my preferred method of correspondence – I feel like sending a letter requires having something to say, but I was entirely happy sending postcards to friends for no other reason than I happened to be thinking of them and saw a postcard I thought they’d like. I made it a practice of sending at least one card a day early in the pandemic, as a way to try to maintain some kind of tangible connection with folks I suddenly stopped being able to get together with.
So, when Graham Beck encouraged everyone to join Postcrossing on World Postcard Day in 2020, well, I was most of the way on board already. And while I may have joined Postcrossing mainly because I wanted to send more mail, I can’t begin to say how wonderful it is to get postcards. There’s something profoundly wonderful about knowing that someone who I may never meet, somewhere in the world, spent some of their time to make my day a little better.
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I like this sentiment very much!
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