It's like Reddit except lots of unrelated people ran it and you dialed into it with a modem.
A: It's like Wifi you can hear.
So there were a lot of indie BBSes that scaled to... 1 concurrent user.
I am having a weird time-travel moment remembering Telix continuously trying to redial through busy signals to BBS's to play my next turn on some door game while I listened to Smiths songs on FM radio and soldered crystals into Radio Shack touchpads so I could get free calls from pay phones.
Let's see how many of those concepts the median HN user remembers. :)
The best "purchasable power up" in the game was an "All You Can Eat"... which ran out very quickly, so not quite what was advertised.
Payphone hacking was not much of a thing in Brazil but I spent days on Bluebeep on international R2 connections. It is amazing to think how hard you had to work to be able to call abroad. The scarcity in everything made for a lot of fun.
Toneloc was also something I recall from the era that was outstanding. It is a pity I never printed out the full exchange scans I had, as they were beautiful.