Comment by hollowonepl
4 hours ago
BBSes is one of those last places in the internet where you still can find your tribe without algorithms and, too much crying about politics. I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.
I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.
I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.
Where do you live that you know the people in your neighborhood?
2 replies →
I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.
Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.
Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.
> I’m glad it’s still hard UX entry to many as we don’t need many there. Just those enough few who get it
Of course, we can't forget the rampant elitism among sysops (and no, I'm not counting myself outside of that group - I was downright insufferable back in the day).