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I came from the BBS era before Usenet and I think that would be an interesting experiment in social networking today.

Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc.

A small percentage of people like running things like this. Right now they're probably starting up a Facebook group that has draconian content restrictions and extremely limited functionality. Make it easy for them to start a BBS - either on a SaaS platform or literally hosted on their own device, they might just switch to it.

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> I came from the BBS era before Usenet

Unless you were dialing up to CBBS between 1978-1980, i.e. the only BBS in the world at the time, then USENET predates your BBS era, which I would assume like most is really somewhere between 1984-1994, even if BBS existed prior to then and after then.

In practice I think access to BBS systems came before Usenet for many of us. I didn't have Usenet access until I had internet access (through a BBS). And I didn't have a good nntp server until I had a dedicated ISP many years after accessing dialup, non-internet BBS systems.

I remember reporting a PINE newsgroup thread bug at the height of my nntp usage and several of the local BBS systems had started dying off by then.

The opposite is also true for many, namely, lots of university students who were on usenet in the computer labs, and maybe had a TRS-80 in the dorm connected to nothing.

There were also a number of Usenet <-> FidoNet/echomail gateways. This was especially useful for local BBS users that weren’t affiliated with any university computing facilities.

Yes, PC-based BBS systems BBS systems were quite widespread going back to at least the early eighties. (BBSs existed before that but were often pretty primitive--e.g. a personal computer with a floppy drive and a 300 baud modem. You had a sort of parallel version of Usenet because in addition to the local BBS you had PCRelay, FIDOnet, and possibly other message exchanges between systems.

Especially the commercial BBSs could have quite a few systems and phone lines and, as you say the bigger BBSs often became the first ISP that consumers had access to if they didn't have access through their company or university.

You also had the big commercial services like Compuserve, AOL, Bix, Delphi, and so forth.

That's true but the BBSes were available to anyone with the money for a computer, modem and the phone bill. Usenet and the internet was reserved for the chosen few.

So in that sense BBSes would predate Usenet for most people.

I got Usenet access before I got full internet (even dialup) in fact but it was much later, in the mid 90s, using a really expensive UUCP account.

For most people outside universities, BBSes came first for all practical purposes.

> Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to. Once there they can read/post on public message boards, they can send direct messages to other users on the same BBS, they can exchange files between them, they can play multiplayer online games with their friends, engage in group chat, etc.

So, Discord?

Discord is centralised, proprietary and all owned and controlled by one company.

Which 99% of people couldn't care less about.

Hey there, former sysop here, both on a C64 in the late 80s and a PC in the early 90s. I've been tossing around the idea of starting another one that you ssh to, and make it available as a docker image. Would anyone show up? Maybe if I make a web interface...

I have left all social media - this site is the only social thing I do now - and this whole thread is giving me all kinds of sad feels.

> Allow regular people to set up a BBS that other people could connect to.

What do you mean "allow"? Unless you have a ridiculous ISP, you're allowed to host just about anything. I seriously doubt any ISPs are blocking NNTP, UUCP, or SSH.

“Make it easy for them to start a BBS”

You mean, like this?

https://enigma-bbs.github.io/

That's not really a BBS, though... a BBS was something you dialed a phone into. I don't think that in the modern era of ubiquitous cell phones, that you really could set up an actual BBS.

I disagree. The modem was the transport mechanism of the BBS and it did shape the experience. With that said, just as we are still seeing great new games being produced with 8-bit style graphics in a world where the hardware can do fully immersive VR, I believe that the experience of the BBS is still just as relevant today over IP, especially in the context of this original post.

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