I make interactive data stories for a living.

There's a website called Postcrossing (not related to them, at all). You mail a real postcard to a stranger the site picks for you. When it lands, your address goes into the pot, and a completely different stranger mails one to you. That's it. That's the whole website. A student in Portugal built it in 2005 because he wanted more mail, and 21 years later it has moved 87 million postcards. Seven people run it.

I spent last week inside its data. Helen is 101, lives in a senior assisted living community, and gets postcards from strangers a few times a month. She told the site's blog: "It's almost like taking a trip - you get a picture in your mind. It's like a little vacation." A member in Germany wrote that during her years of depression, sending out cards "was the only reason for me to leave my house."

Here's the part that got me. Being a member has gotten objectively worse every year. The mail is slower now (about 20 days a card) and stamps cost actual money (three euros, in Finland). By every rule of the internet this thing should be dead. Instead they mail about five million cards a year, through a pandemic, and through a war that shut the mail routes into Russia, where 112,727 members are still signed up and waiting. The site refused to ban them, by the way.

Right now there are 422,616 postcards somewhere between strangers. Mail bags, planes, bicycle baskets. Somebody's about to have a really good Tuesday and they don't know it yet.

It's so refreshing to see that in Today's AI world, people are waiting to hear from someone they don't know for over 20 days.

Interactive version, if anyone wants to see it.

Source: https://www.littlebigworld.de/

Middle school childhood friend visited me. Honestly thought we probably weren't as close as we once were bc of how little we see each other. It's 1AM and I am bawling.

We've been friends for 14 years now :)

Our love for Evanescence was one of those early things we had in common when we first met and now it’s our 10 year anniversary and this felt surreal!

This is so sweet!

My heart ❤️

While cooking, I saw this…

I haven’t been to a concert since 2019 with my husband (boyfriend at the time), I was supposed to go see MCR with my father in 2022 but my daughter was only 4months old at the time so I was worried about leaving her. This will be our first concert as a family and a concert for me to mark off my bucket list! When I first listened to MCR in 7th grade I told all my friends I would go to their concert one day but I didn’t know the band was broken up. Well over a decade later but hey! I finally get to see them and with the people I love most. I’m so excited!!