Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a >> BJ> new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made
sense.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can have full
Internet email?
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
Why bother publishing anything in a BBS-constrained presence, when you
can publish a Gopher site and instantly be world-reachable?
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than
BBS.
On 2026-05-31, Juancho wrote:>
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made
sense.
In a few specific countries, I gather? There's a bunch of historical
systems that don't seem to make much sense until you consider in some
places local calls were free at least to part of the telephony
customers.
I wish I had that when I had to use dial-up. At one point you even had
to pay separately for the call *and* the Internet service.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the
smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something better...
On 2026-05-31, Juancho wrote:<snip>
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something better...
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
Agreed, it is bigger.Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it
regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
It's also worth noting that the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon.
;)
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a >> BJ> new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made sense.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can have full
Internet email?
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
Why bother publishing anything in a BBS-constrained presence, when you
can publish a Gopher site and instantly be world-reachable?
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than BBS.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
We've had usenet for many years as well. Have you been on a bbs in the
last forty years? It doesn't seem like it. We don't require modems
anymore. Some boards still offer dialup access on top of ssh/telnet. It
is more for nostalgic reasons though.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a
new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see >> their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the >> brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
That's not true, whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest >visiting a few bbs systems out there. But, not in this case.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made sense.
In the 1980s and early 90s, this was true.
Today, some boards are silo'd by design, and in many cases it's for >nostalgia. Sometimes, it's a project board owned by sysops who have
multiple live BBS systems. But there are many bbses that aren't
silo'd whatsoever. Far from it.
Many boards, like mine, have portals to wikipedia and weather
services, lynx interface, some sports API access. We even aggregate news >feeds with full story downloads. No ads, clickbait, side-loaded iframes, >trackers, cookies, cookie alerts. Quite a number of boards out there
serve as information gateways for all to use.
[snip]
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than BBS.
None of your statements are true. Some guys out there may have believed
your malicious post and some of them may have turned away from exploring
the mature BBS landscape. I'm just glad that the usenet population is
really small and niche. The damage you've done may be minimal.
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in
the times of metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they
totally made sense.
In the 1980s and early 90s, this was true.
Today, some boards are silo'd by design, and in many cases it's for nostalgia. Sometimes, it's a project board owned by sysops who have multiple live BBS systems. But there are many bbses that aren't
silo'd whatsoever. Far from it.
Many boards, like mine, have portals to wikipedia and weather
services, lynx interface, some sports API access. We even aggregate
news feeds with full story downloads. No ads, clickbait, side-loaded iframes, trackers, cookies, cookie alerts. Quite a number of boards out there serve as information gateways for all to use.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for
partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet
access.
That's merely your opinion. What seems better to one may not be for others.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
We've had usenet for many years as well. Have you been on a bbs in the last forty years? It doesn't seem like it. We don't require modems anymore. Some boards still offer dialup access on top of ssh/telnet. It
is more for nostalgic reasons though.
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can
have full Internet email?
For a number of years, my primary email was on a bbs. I even had thunderbird configured to pull from it if I wasn't going to be on the
bbs that day. IMAP for the win.
Synchronet has supported this feature as far back as I remember and the developer of the system has been quite active on adding features for years. Hell, the primary scripting language for door creation is javascript. Can't be more web-based/modern than that.
I don't actually offer echomail on my bbs. But this may change after I switch bbs services. Time will tell.
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
But they are not something that needs defense on their technical
merits.
On Tue, 2 Jun 2026 11:01:02 -0000 (UTC)
cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
But they are not something that needs defense on their technical
merits.
They're also not something that needs an unprovoked pithy dismissal,
for that matter.
None of this stuff is *necessary,* in the grand scheme of things,
except for what society demands we use in order to get through life,*
and the world is full of unsettling creeps who would be perfectly happy
for us to consider *everything* outmoded except for whatever they're
trying to sell us on. (D'you really think Facebook is sandboxing out-
side links and displaying them in an in-app web browser because they
care about anyone's security!?)
* (You *do* remember your online banking password? It's okay if you
don't, just use our app! But if you need to reset it, hope you hung
onto that old e-mail address you lost when the ISP sold out to AT&T,
or you can set up biometric 2FA that we pinky-swear we won't sell to
Palantir...!)
We're still on Usenet/BBSes/IRC/Web fora/freakin' *Gopher* because they
are specific ways of interacting with the larger world that we *like,*
and even prefer to whatever is currently the mainstream. All of these
things are Considered Outmoded by that standard; what's the point in
having a pissing match over which is *more* obsolete!?
One thing left unmentioned - ANSI art. There are some amazing
examples of ANSI art, both installed into BBSes and art packs
available for viewing/download from versious art groups.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired
operating systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better
options than BBS.
None of your statements are true. Some guys out there may have believed
your malicious post and some of them may have turned away from exploring
the mature BBS landscape. I'm just glad that the usenet population is
really small and niche. The damage you've done may be minimal.
-- Daniel sysop | air & wave bbs finger | info@bbs.airandwave.net
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it
regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
But isn't that exactly what mastodon wants to be? A twitter clone?
Thankfully, there's lots of other fediverse servers that are a lot less resource hungry. GoToSocial comes to mind, or snac.
https://gotosocial.org/
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> writes:
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
[...]
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it >>> regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
It's also worth noting that the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon.
;)
Agreed, it is bigger.
Although Nuno's point still stand, Mastodon (the biggest share of the Fediverse accounts) trying to be an X/Twitter clone is making Mastodon loosing more and more users.
Another thing is that Mastodon has a lot of jerks as system admins of
big Mastodon instance servers, which was why I made an escape from it.
| Sysop: | Tetrazocine |
|---|---|
| Location: | Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
| Users: | 15 |
| Nodes: | 8 (0 / 8) |
| Uptime: | 118:01:14 |
| Calls: | 218 |
| Files: | 21,503 |
| Messages: | 84,117 |