It’s a question that most anyone who at least has a cursory knowledge of the subject will inevitably ask, in some form, when the topic if brought up of running an old fashioned Bulletin Board System in 2020 — why? Why would you spend the time and energy for something so primitive; a concept of networking that’s basically been completely supplanted by social media?
A simple answer would be, in one sense, that I run one because of social media — or, more accurately, in spite of it.
To put it simply, social media sucks. There’s far more to say about it than I can even begin to cover in this small entry (I may devote a few articles to that in the near future) but in short form I’m quite certain you, the reader, have a laundry list of complaints about any given social media platform, and I’m also certain virtually none of those problems you have would exist on a BBS.
Their isolated and inherently primitive nature means they just don’t have the same problems that you find on services where virtually everyone is interacting with everyone else constantly. Conversations are easier to follow, “memes” virtually don’t exist beyond modest inside jokes, you don’t have distracting animated gifs making the very act of looking at messages an unpleasant experience, there’s no million-subscriber “influencers” who basically dictate whatever the next flavor of the week topic will be — it’s just basic communication, some file sharing, some simple but damn fun games, and an experience that dates back to the earliest days of computing.
Really, it is the fact that BBS’s go against the grain of how the modern online social landscape is. Just like the GOPHER protocol, with all its order and standard design predates and stands against the modern web, to this day so to do BBS’s live in spite of the webs dominance and eventually the growth of social media, smartphones, and the rest of the quite disposable culture which has formed in the past 20-30 years.
In a sense, the fact that they are a bit harder to use, and require understanding the way things used to be and how, at the very basis, the internet works, is what gives them a charm. I’m personally as proud of my BBS, Final Zone, as I am this website, but in some ways even more so since I run the board from a computer running locally, which I set up and had to customize myself. No one was going to do it for me, and the fact that I not only got it going but that people regularly use it and enjoy it is just the best.
So, yeah, if you wonder why I, or others, would want to use something like a BBS in 2020, all you have to do is look at the rest of the digital landscape and realize that, beyond the natural tendencies of humans to do what we do best with petty squabbles and bickering, Bulletin Board Systems are absolutely nothing like the rest of the internet, and that’s a damn good thing.