This project hits that sweet spot where "old timers" who remember the lo-fi social web have a place to call their own while also being appealing to the "young guns" who have only ever known the social web in the age of Facebook/Twitter and are looking for an alternative where not everything is easy and beautiful.
I've been using the internet before the Facebook/Myspace boom, but I never had the chance to really experience the "old-web" or usenet. This "project" gives me a chance to see a part of internet history that I missed or was too young to remember delivered from people who were there.
It's a really unique project for people like myself, and I find it comforting to see culture of the internet that I saw a glimpse of in my childhood.
As I came of age on the internet in the early 2000s, there were enough vestiges of stuff like Usenet that I was familiar with it but it was clear it was in terminal decline. And I always felt bummed that I missed that era.
Another thing that I really like about this project is how it combines new and old technologies. Like how it's a "standard UNIX computer on the internet" but runs on Amazon's cloud. Collaboration is done via Github. You sign-up via a Google Form. We have these amazing infrastructure tools now which didn't exist 10 years ago. It's really something to see.