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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

This is very helpful to those of us who never experienced BBSes.

I'm the downvoted poster above, and I used to run a BBS. Mostly hosting info files and CP/M software (Thanks U.S. Robotics, couldn't have done it without HST). I am genuinely interested in know where (and if) such a network of people could ever exist again. For those who may be too young to get the joke... Reddit is certainly not it.

One major thing missing with Reddit is the focus on geographic locality. BBSes had more of a community feel because 99% of the users were local, and this was enforced by financial reality. Few people in the 80's or 90's wanted to call long distance, unless they were distributing warez at someone else's expense (in which case they probably weren't reading and posting messages anyway!)

You can get "some" of this feel from the state / city focused subreddits... but... it's still not the same.

Right, but FidoNets didn't have this localization; that was part of their point.

Some FidoNet boards did, actually! The FidoNet boards near me all carried "regional" forums / echoes that were available only within the regional network itself. I was actually way more active on those forums than the global ones.

(By "active", I mainly mean participating in flame wars. If any of those sysops are reading, I do apologize for the behavior of my teenage self.)

Sure, in the same sense that there is an /r/chicago on Reddit. :)

The huge win to hooking your BBS up to a FidoNet (or the FidoNet) was that you'd immediately be having conversations with people all over the country.

>For those who may be too young to get the joke...

I'm going to continue to assume that GGP is sincere until its author says it was a joke.

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