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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.

I met many local people though BBSs. It was an amazing way to find like minded geeks near you.

I think that if you are 40+ which is BBS target continually, then you should know all neighborhood nerds worth knowing, internet BBSes where you don’t lose time on idiocracy is exactly that neighborhood worth virtual saving. Post code doesn’t matter that much as the right mental model to survive and thrive there.

Where do you live that you know the people in your neighborhood?

In the area where instead of Waymo, local taxi driver who still look like me and speaks my language drives the cabs and gives me discounts when we both have last ride back home from downtown. And we talk to each other more than sue each other

San Jose. My wife and I have lived in the same house for 10 years and know about 80% of the neighbors in a two block radius. We also probably know 50 additional families within a square mile as a result of our kids going to public schools here. This is essentially just like how it was when I grew up in the 80s, in a rural East Coast City of about 75k.

Where do you live that you don’t know the people in your neighbourhood?

Yes, I miss those days. The late 80's through mid 90's was the golden age of BBSing. The transition from BBSes to ISPs was fun, but I still miss the community aspect of BBSes.

I'm ok with losing location bias. being from a small town and only having 50 ppl in our area code that werent long distance that knew about bbss meant 80% of them were crazy, old, or had weird/obscure interests. I did make a lot of friends during that era.

The internet was a structurally different place.

It's crazy to think about unencrypted, direct connections, where you literally dialed the phone number of a computer in someone's house, and that phone line was occupied for the entire session.

Interestingly, the FediVerse has that. Not in the big nodes that you've probably heard of, like Mastodon.Social. But there are loads of smaller nodes that definitely have moderate to strong degrees of locality.

>Unfortunately it lost one of the most compelling features of the classic BBS culture: location bias.

I was thinking about trying to recapture this with a non-internet wifi or mesh networking setup in some way.

Maybe one could abuse the captive portal feature.

It would not have the broad regional aspect unless it was a federated mesh, but it would certainly have the local bias. I don’t think there are enough techy people in my immediate vicinity to pull something like that off and have the community sustain itself, though.

I found a bit of this with the Meshtastic/Meshcore community in my city. I haven't participated lately, but I still keep a node running at home to try to support the network in a very limited way. Fun to pop on every so often and say hello, see who has new gear, and gauge the activity levels around me.

I also keep one in my car in case of ... something.

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