Musings Out Loud: Reviving "The Postcard Project," Hive Style?
Back in "another life" — during my earlier days of blogging — a group of us started up an interactive community project as a very small attempt at creating a "Tangible Reality" behind this idea of people who'd never actually met each other managing to connect so deeply in virtual space.
2002 "Greetings From Washington" stamp (from my own collection)
We sit in our homes, being "keyboard warriors" behind our screens and perhaps are given to forget that there are real flesh-and-blood people behind the inspiring, funny, thoughtful, irritating, uplifting, infuriating or whatever words scrolling across our screens.
The "Postcard Project" idea germinated as a number of us deciding to send out actual snail mail Christmas Cards to each other, but quickly evolved into bloggers all over the world sending each other postcards from their home areas, and then sharing the received cards and greetings as part of subsequent blog posts.
No, the idea was not mine, nor was it original; the inspiration came from the hugely successful Postcrossing Project whose hundreds of thousands of members have mailed almost sixty-five million postcards to each other since 2005.
When we started, though, Postcrossing was still in its earliest days and we took matters into our own hands because we didn't want to mail postcards to complete strangers, but instead to people we somewhat knew.
Privacy Issues?
Just like we likely are today, back then people also had hesitancy and questions about the whole idea of sharing their addresses with strangers online... and it was definitely not something for the most private and anonymous of the group; the participants were the more open and adventurous among us.
To the best of my knowledge, nothing weird happened in the roughly 4 years I was at least peripherally involved in the project. My guess is that the general rule that you would share what you received online would keep people "self-policed" from mailing anything rude or lewd.
Addresses were typically shared via mutually agreed on emails or private messages, and it was common courtesy to "black out" addresses in pictures posted of postcards received.
Postcard Collecting is Fun!
Postcard collecting — formally know as "Deltiology" — is a fun and quite popular hobby that has enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence in popularity with the advent of email and virtual spaces.
Picture postcards are cool because they often depict local scenes and culture, and pretty much every corner of the world has at least a few local postcards as well as postcards depicting major landmarks and tourist attractions.
Mrs Denmarkguy (as an example) has collected both vintage and new postcards since childhood.
Translated to Hive?
I am pretty sure there are a number of postcard exchanges and letter-writing exchanges still active on the web, but it occurred to me that something like this had likely never been done on the blockchain.
On Hive, a modified "Postcard Project" would likely be of most appeal to the type of people who go to HiveFest or attend Hive Meetups... and no so much to the privacy anarchists sitting in their foxholes, waiting for the enemy to come after them.
But you never know!
Unlike other venues, the actual expense of buying a postcard and stamp would be readily "reimbursed" by a few upvotes on "sent it!" and "received it!" posts.
The options for contact information could be either an encrypted wallet memo or Discord messages.
At this point, just putting feelers out, to get a sense of whether anyone would be even remotely interested? Would it be a way to feel a little more connected in the "age of Covid," or does it just sound like an invitation for lots of $hitposts?
I'm really not attached, either way... just hanging the idea out there!
Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 20211213 21:58 PST
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