I was rewatching Jason Scott's BBS Documentary, as one does.
See, I was making a fake BBS:
The only purpose of this was to test out text render/entry in Kawa Scheme for Lisp Game Jam. It also does a modem squeal on "connection", so I know audio works, & this brings back all the emotions.
Back in the '80s, early '90s, there were four (ish) kinds of BBS's.
- Corpo spaces like GEnie, Delphi, CashWe$erve. Pay per hour (pretty cheap on Delphi), but only place you could get some corpo information & celebrity chats, for me with real cyberpunk writers like Walter Jon Williams & Bruce Sterling; for normies, with, I dunno, Debbie Gibson?
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Straight-laced BBS's for specific topics, official forums for game companies, etc. Boring, incredibly oppressive rules. Get in, get info, get out. A few had doorgames, but you had to avoid smack-talk, which was no fun.
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FidoNet. I was on a couple of these but didn't engage much. Watched the doc up thru the Fidonet chapter, & jiminy I'm glad I avoided that nest of vipers. Yes, continent-wide communication, but also the people in charge of that were the worst kind of petty unelected tyrants. Smaller networks like CitNet & WWIVnet were more forgiving, & once Internet access was gained, it was a free for all on email & USENET. But local culture was still better on non-networked boards.
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Insane local h4xx0r boards where we "stole" (without hurting anyone much), broke laws (that needed breaking), & had a good time. If the Sysop was your friend and/or you uploaded cool stuff, you could do anything. If not, you could hit the road to the next one. I learned an enormous amount both technically & otherwise on these boards.
My own boards were type 4. The Dungeon was a STarNet (Atari 520ST, floppy) board, mostly messages & files for my TTRPG games. I remember I typed in complete character creation for RoleMaster 2E + my setting stuff, so I wouldn't have to do what's now called "session zero" at the table. But we did all sorts of weird stuff on there! Turns out "role-play" isn't just rolling dice at the table!
The Caves of Steel was Fnordadel (Citadel on Mega 2 ST), some TTRPG chat but mostly doorgames I wrote or modified, & file share either from local warez or that I'd download from the Internet; full-time Interent access was hard. Users could pay for higher minutes (game turns & download time), so mostly it paid for the lines & then some. I ruled with an iron but exasperated fist; half the users were very non-technical, & I had to write long HOWTOs; the other half were l33t h4xx0rz who literally were trying to get shell.
And what's weird is 40 years later, these are STILL your choices, but on social media.
- Is still corpo hell-site silos, f-c-b--k, shitbird, taktak, & insta-not-matic, if you know what I mean. If you stay there, you deserve what you get. At this point, you have to know there's alternatives, but to willingly say "but Britney Spears is there! I have to follow BREETNEE!", just ignore all the hate crimes going on there.
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Masto soc, bluhski, threads (is that still up?), & other wannabe-open but not really sites. Dull. RSS feeds without the virtue of open protocols. Sometimes a "starter site" to reach the better levels.
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Accidental hell-sites. Reddit, tumblr, slashdot (still exists!), like nobody reasonable would go there, the social graph is horrific, but sometimes amazing things get spewed out of them. Don't engage, unless you like living in toxic codependence with people you hate. I was hopeful the Digg reboot would pull out of this & into Wild, but it got overrun by spam.
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Wild Fediverse. Instances outside masto soc tend towards small, focused communities. radical hacker, lgbtqia+, furry, specific local areas, or weird subcultures. I stay on an instance based on a past attempt to pay for a private garden community. Just enough barrier to entry that we rarely have Nazi bars, & actively hunt down & block advertisers & propagandists. Fedi LITERALLY posts cheering images of Mario (not the videogame) & guillotines & burning warehouses. Like sticking a bunch of corpo skulls & neckties on pikes outside your post-apocalyptic wasteland town.
