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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

I guess I don’t really have a point, it was just a curious thought experiment. Bulletin board systems were decentralized social networking, then the interconnected Internet changed that. Telephone companies are public utilities. The FCC is a federal agency. It would seem that if we could turn back the clocks, it would be a lot harder to shut down a WSB bulletin board system, like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord have done.

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I don't think BBSs were decentralized. You phoned a specific server, usually it had like 5 lines and you had to wait until one is free, and you had a session time limit... where's the decentralization? How is it different from HTTP->TCP->IP->Ethernet connection to a server?

When talking about centralization you can always of course zoom in the different levels. Decentralized systems are made up of systems that viewed individually can be said to be centralized.

BBSes viewed as an archipelago are decentralized.

Fidonet, a network to exchange mail between BBSes, was somewhat decentralized.

That’s a really good point that I hadn’t considered, thank you. When I spoke about bulletin board systems being decentralized, I was thinking more in terms of the interconnected Internet. Facebook is a centralized social network, it has tremendous reach. But a bulletin board system is one phone line (or five if you’re really lucky) and anyone can splin up a bulletin board system. The limiting factor is of course the phone lines, and if you don’t like one, you can go to another.

You can spin up your website too (and it's way easier and cheaper than running a BBS), where is the problem?

I think this overlooks just how locked-down things were back then.

It may have all been federally regulated, but that doesn't do much in a media monoculture -- which makes it so much easier for well-connected elites to frame their own nuisances as public enemies. There was no viable venue for actual dissent.

There have been some bad bbs operations with criminal content that got shut down.

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