@achso@mastodon.social OMG... I was a point too! 😛

And the battles we had with a knuckle head local sysop who got elected as net coordinator, epic. I remember discussing things directly with him, via NetMail delivered from my own BinkleyTerm right to his BBS front end.

We had a nice group of like minded people, met for coffee and hours long talk sessions at a local family restaurant. Loved it, this was when we were limited to whoever you could find locally for geek chatting.

I became a hub in our network later, although never run a BBS, just the front end and back routing and processing. Getting it all working smoothly was fun.

I remember being in bed at night and hearing the system reboot at midnight and do a brief maintenance run, then back on, waiting for incoming calls.

Nowadays we see a similar spirit, of independence and curiosity, tinkering. People setting up an instance, Pleroma runs even in a Raspberry Pi little thing.

I have my own non-federated Writefreely instance here, and it's neat; when I complete a post locally, with lightning fast saves ad edits, I know I can copy-paste into my live online WF accounts and it will look perfect, as we run the same software.

That is a story for another blog day; I will need to get more comfortable with explaining how to setup MySQL before I can tell people they can do it, yes. (What a bitch, for me, completely inexperienced with it)