I still think this is because of the ratio of active, seasoned, reliable members that reach either a comfortable limit (e.g. the number of postcards they afford to send monthly - time-wise or money-wise) or a hard limit (100 traveling) compared to the ratio of people that quit postcrossing because it is too expensive / no longer attractive for them / real life gets in the way.
To me, the number of people that join monthly, stick around, and always send to the max is nowadays (compared to 5 or 10 years ago) too small in the sea of all postcrossers ever (and even of all postcrossers currently active). I don’t think an increase of slots will “revive” postcrossing - I don’t think it will be noticeable in the stats.
But an increase in slots might bring unbalance to the system in the sense that there are already too few addresses in the pool when somebody draws an address. I have another analysis here on how that impacts me (and most users from countries say below top 10) personally - the first time my address goes into the pool, it is drawn 40-50 times (depending on how many cards I have traveling at the time). I quickly go to having more cards received than sent, then my address won’t go near the pool for weeks or even months.
On January 24th, a single card of mine drew me 41 cards. Nobody drew my address since Jan 28th - even though I kept drawing and sending. Soon I will cross the sent < received line again, and there will be another avalanche.
And unfortunately, a high number of cards drawn by new members are never sent. I think the cost of increasing their limits would outweigh the benefits. I think it’s good we have a hard limit where newbies aren’t allowed to make too much of an impact. When are we sure they are reliable? 10, 50, 100, 500 sent cards? How many of them would send more if given the chance, and how many are at a comfortable limit already?
A local friend and postcrosser recently moved; she still had access to her old mailbox, but decided it would be cleaner to autoregister everything travelling to her, even if she set her account to inactive plenty of time in advance. The system showed 23 cards! Only two of those actually arrived at a later date. A few had scanned images and were from well seasoned members - the rest were from people who were inactive for months, had very few or no cards sent and registered, and might have never bothered to send them in the first place.
And another little experiment 
I took 10 countries or regions of variable activity, counted the members that have signed up in February, and the total number of cards they sent until present date. This cannot account for people that have deleted their accounts since then. Let’s compare this against the total number of active* members in the same country/region (by active here I mean “logged in last month” - not necessarily sending any cards). I tried to make it diverse, selecting countries and provinces from various continents
| # |
Country/region |
New members in February 2023 |
Total postcards they sent |
Total Active* Members |
Members all time |
| 1 |
Australia, Queensland |
6 |
19 |
117 |
1233 |
| 2 |
Bulgaria (whole) |
11 |
7 |
192 |
1703 |
| 3 |
Czechia, Olomoucký kraj |
3 |
4 |
83 |
1232 |
| 4 |
Canada, Ontario |
31 |
88 |
530 |
4209 |
| 5 |
Finland, South Karelia |
2 |
6 |
46 |
373 |
| 6 |
Germany, Berlin |
30 |
63 |
501 |
3313 |
| 7 |
Hong Kong, Central and Western District |
6 |
0 |
177 |
6884 |
| 8 |
Norway (whole) |
6 |
38 |
133 |
1248 |
| 9 |
Russia, Leningrad oblast |
12 |
4 |
176 |
1479 |
| 10 |
UK, London |
9 |
3 |
174 |
>1000 |
Source:
- New members and their cards: search by country/province, showing people active in the last three months; sort by membership; select people who joined in feb 2023, count their cards
- Total active members: search by country/province, showing people active in the last month
- Members all time: explore → countries; browse all members; filter by province/city
(I’m sorry I’m hijacking your post with my numbers. I felt I had to get it all out 
)
