Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a >> BJ> new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made
sense.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can have full
Internet email?
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
Why bother publishing anything in a BBS-constrained presence, when you
can publish a Gopher site and instantly be world-reachable?
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than
BBS.
On 2026-05-31, Juancho wrote:>
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made
sense.
In a few specific countries, I gather? There's a bunch of historical
systems that don't seem to make much sense until you consider in some
places local calls were free at least to part of the telephony
customers.
I wish I had that when I had to use dial-up. At one point you even had
to pay separately for the call *and* the Internet service.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the
smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something better...
On 2026-05-31, Juancho wrote:<snip>
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something better...
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
Agreed, it is bigger.Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it
regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
It's also worth noting that the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon.
;)
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a >> BJ> new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made sense.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet access.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can have full
Internet email?
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
Why bother publishing anything in a BBS-constrained presence, when you
can publish a Gopher site and instantly be world-reachable?
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than BBS.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
We've had usenet for many years as well. Have you been on a bbs in the
last forty years? It doesn't seem like it. We don't require modems
anymore. Some boards still offer dialup access on top of ssh/telnet. It
is more for nostalgic reasons though.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
2026-02-19, Kurt Weiske <kurt.weiske@realitycheckbbs.org.remove-d7b-this> wrote:
Beej Jorgensen wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org
Excellent... One of my many side projects to never get to is to write a
new BBS from scratch in Rust. :)
Please do! There are others writing BBSes from scratch and resurrecting
old BBS packages. It's exciting seeing some activity in the scene.
BBS are quite isolated in terms of "reaching out to the world", I don't see >> their appeal compared to hosting/using a pubnix/tilde server loaded to the >> brim with Internet-native, text-based tools.
That's not true, whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest >visiting a few bbs systems out there. But, not in this case.
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in the times of
metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they totally made sense.
In the 1980s and early 90s, this was true.
Today, some boards are silo'd by design, and in many cases it's for >nostalgia. Sometimes, it's a project board owned by sysops who have
multiple live BBS systems. But there are many bbses that aren't
silo'd whatsoever. Far from it.
Many boards, like mine, have portals to wikipedia and weather
services, lynx interface, some sports API access. We even aggregate news >feeds with full story downloads. No ads, clickbait, side-loaded iframes, >trackers, cookies, cookie alerts. Quite a number of boards out there
serve as information gateways for all to use.
[snip]
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired operating
systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better options than BBS.
None of your statements are true. Some guys out there may have believed
your malicious post and some of them may have turned away from exploring
the mature BBS landscape. I'm just glad that the usenet population is
really small and niche. The damage you've done may be minimal.
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
I see BBS as islands designed to serve small geographical areas in
the times of metered dial-up connectivity. For that scenario, they
totally made sense.
In the 1980s and early 90s, this was true.
Today, some boards are silo'd by design, and in many cases it's for nostalgia. Sometimes, it's a project board owned by sysops who have multiple live BBS systems. But there are many bbses that aren't
silo'd whatsoever. Far from it.
Many boards, like mine, have portals to wikipedia and weather
services, lynx interface, some sports API access. We even aggregate
news feeds with full story downloads. No ads, clickbait, side-loaded iframes, trackers, cookies, cookie alerts. Quite a number of boards out there serve as information gateways for all to use.
But there are better options (namely, pubnix and tildes) for
partaking in the smolnet in a world of always-on, universal Internet
access.
That's merely your opinion. What seems better to one may not be for others.
Why use BBS-siloed message boards, when you can have full USENET access?
We've had usenet for many years as well. Have you been on a bbs in the last forty years? It doesn't seem like it. We don't require modems anymore. Some boards still offer dialup access on top of ssh/telnet. It
is more for nostalgic reasons though.
Why use FIDO email and convoluted inter-zones gateways, when you can
have full Internet email?
For a number of years, my primary email was on a bbs. I even had thunderbird configured to pull from it if I wasn't going to be on the
bbs that day. IMAP for the win.
Synchronet has supported this feature as far back as I remember and the developer of the system has been quite active on adding features for years. Hell, the primary scripting language for door creation is javascript. Can't be more web-based/modern than that.
I don't actually offer echomail on my bbs. But this may change after I switch bbs services. Time will tell.
Why use BBS chat rooms, when you have IRC at a global scale?
But they are not something that needs defense on their technical
merits.
On Tue, 2 Jun 2026 11:01:02 -0000 (UTC)
cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
But they are not something that needs defense on their technical
merits.
They're also not something that needs an unprovoked pithy dismissal,
for that matter.
None of this stuff is *necessary,* in the grand scheme of things,
except for what society demands we use in order to get through life,*
and the world is full of unsettling creeps who would be perfectly happy
for us to consider *everything* outmoded except for whatever they're
trying to sell us on. (D'you really think Facebook is sandboxing out-
side links and displaying them in an in-app web browser because they
care about anyone's security!?)
* (You *do* remember your online banking password? It's okay if you
don't, just use our app! But if you need to reset it, hope you hung
onto that old e-mail address you lost when the ISP sold out to AT&T,
or you can set up biometric 2FA that we pinky-swear we won't sell to
Palantir...!)
We're still on Usenet/BBSes/IRC/Web fora/freakin' *Gopher* because they
are specific ways of interacting with the larger world that we *like,*
and even prefer to whatever is currently the mainstream. All of these
things are Considered Outmoded by that standard; what's the point in
having a pissing match over which is *more* obsolete!?
One thing left unmentioned - ANSI art. There are some amazing
examples of ANSI art, both installed into BBSes and art packs
available for viewing/download from versious art groups.
Juancho <eternal@notreally.com> writes:
Now that we have always-on Internet and cheap UNIX-derived/-inspired
operating systems (instead of MS-DOS machines), there are better
options than BBS.
None of your statements are true. Some guys out there may have believed
your malicious post and some of them may have turned away from exploring
the mature BBS landscape. I'm just glad that the usenet population is
really small and niche. The damage you've done may be minimal.
-- Daniel sysop | air & wave bbs finger | info@bbs.airandwave.net
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it
regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
But isn't that exactly what mastodon wants to be? A twitter clone?
Thankfully, there's lots of other fediverse servers that are a lot less resource hungry. GoToSocial comes to mind, or snac.
https://gotosocial.org/
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> writes:
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
[...]
Meanwhile, the fediverse could use a bit of a focus on e.g. having
mastodon actually stop trying to be a twitter clone, especially where it >>> regards browser compatibility and CPU and memory usage... it's a bit
like trying to copy Apple smartphones instead of designing something
better...
It's also worth noting that the fediverse is bigger than just Mastodon.
;)
Agreed, it is bigger.
Although Nuno's point still stand, Mastodon (the biggest share of the Fediverse accounts) trying to be an X/Twitter clone is making Mastodon loosing more and more users.
Another thing is that Mastodon has a lot of jerks as system admins of
big Mastodon instance servers, which was why I made an escape from it.
Sadly it seems to be at least their unofficial charter. The UI has some issues that perhaps wouldn't exist if it didn't try to mimick twitter,
and this besides the short character limit per post, which basically
forces people to do "multiposts" even for short stuff, and even
complicates usage of hashtags.
Sadly that one is hardcoded, it can be changed but AFAIK isn't something exposed as a setting administrators can change...
Thankfully, there's lots of other fediverse servers that are a lot less
resource hungry. GoToSocial comes to mind, or snac.
https://gotosocial.org/
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
Brutaldon at least allows a more pleasant experience, even if limited in
some features, but it has issues in OAuth2 that have not been fixed,
making it so that a brutaldon instance might be unable to authenticate
with a mastodon instance if certain conditions have been met in the
past.
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Sadly it seems to be at least their unofficial charter. The UI has some
issues that perhaps wouldn't exist if it didn't try to mimick twitter,
and this besides the short character limit per post, which basically
forces people to do "multiposts" even for short stuff, and even
complicates usage of hashtags.
Sadly that one is hardcoded, it can be changed but AFAIK isn't something
exposed as a setting administrators can change...
The maximum post length can be changed on mastodon.
What that doesn't fix is that people on mastodon don't see threads. I
use friendica, which does show complete threads, but everytime I post something that's mildly popular, I get 10x the same response from
mastodon people who haven't seen the other 9 responses because mastodon doesn't show that.
Thankfully, there's lots of other fediverse servers that are a lot less
resource hungry. GoToSocial comes to mind, or snac.
https://gotosocial.org/
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
Brutaldon at least allows a more pleasant experience, even if limited in
some features, but it has issues in OAuth2 that have not been fixed,
making it so that a brutaldon instance might be unable to authenticate
with a mastodon instance if certain conditions have been met in the
past.
Brutaldon, first I hear about that one. Something to check out!
That besides the point that even when displaying the full thread,
Mastodon's official UIs still don't display it as a thread, with
nesting. As an example http://threadtree.xyz does this but leaves out attachments. I guess this one goes into the "wants to imitate twitter" bucket?
Brutaldon, first I hear about that one. Something to check out!
Might even enable browsing mastodon on low-bandwidth and/or high-latency connections. Most of the troubles I've had with it have been because of
the instance itself, not because of brutaldon.
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
That besides the point that even when displaying the full thread, Mastodon's official UIs still don't display it as a thread, with
nesting. As an example http://threadtree.xyz does this but leaves out attachments. I guess this one goes into the "wants to imitate twitter" bucket?
I think so, but it just makes for poor interaction imho.
Brutaldon, first I hear about that one. Something to check out!
Might even enable browsing mastodon on low-bandwidth and/or high-latency connections. Most of the troubles I've had with it have been because of
the instance itself, not because of brutaldon.
Ah, it's a web front-end for regular mastodon I see now. That still
doesn't take away my major beef with mastodon: it's a bloated piece
of ruby software that guzzles resources like it's no-one's business.
Not that friendica is particularly light though. Which is why I'm
intending to give snac and gotosocial a try. They are being advertised
as light-weight, so if their user experience is anywhere near decent it
might be interesting to switch over.
What's wanted is a platform with a threaded heirarchal message
system^w^w^w^w an exact clone of Usenet that's fast and has lots of intelligent traffic, that attracts well behaved folk, yet keeps out the
troll idiots.
One can dream.
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
"Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> posted:
What's wanted is a platform with a threaded heirarchal message
system^w^w^w^w an exact clone of Usenet that's fast and has lots of
intelligent traffic, that attracts well behaved folk, yet keeps out the
troll idiots.
One can dream.
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it about
the message, not the fluff.
(I'm on the fence with stuff like text-effects like bold and italics. We
can discuss hyperlinking. ;-)
Or is that too old-school?
(More importantly though: the ideal system would have to be decentralized. Usenet wouldn't survived as long as it did if it were dependent on a single provider.)
Verily, in article <10vvnpd$1gkrk$1@dont-email.me>, did ldo@nz.invalid deliver unto us this message:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
ASCII art can go anywhere ASCII can go. That should be fine.
Verily, in article <10vvnpd$1gkrk$1@dont-email.me>, did
ldo@nz.invalid deliver unto us this message:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
ASCII art can go anywhere ASCII can go. That should be fine.
SpallsHurgenson(NG) <user14325@newsgrouper.org.invalid> writes:
"Kerr-Mudd, John" <admin@127.0.0.1> posted:
What's wanted is a platform with a threaded heirarchal message
system^w^w^w^w an exact clone of Usenet that's fast and has lots of
intelligent traffic, that attracts well behaved folk, yet keeps out the
troll idiots.
One can dream.
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it about
the message, not the fluff.
(I'm on the fence with stuff like text-effects like bold and italics. We
can discuss hyperlinking. ;-)
Or is that too old-school?
(More importantly though: the ideal system would have to be decentralized. >> Usenet wouldn't survived as long as it did if it were dependent on a single >> provider.)
I would push back slightly on the no emoji thing, not because I feel any particular way about emoji themselves, but if you want this system to be
able to serve non English-speaking users, Unicode support would be the
best (though admittedly imperfect) tool we've currently got for that
purpose.
On Sat, 6 Jun 2026 07:07:56 -0400, The True Melissa wrote:
Verily, in article <10vvnpd$1gkrk$1@dont-email.me>, did
ldo@nz.invalid deliver unto us this message:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
ASCII art can go anywhere ASCII can go. That should be fine.
Then you have to ask, why not simply allow Unicode?
Emojis are still an accessibility problem. Having them handled
via UCS *should* be good from a point of view of ensuring some
consistency and well-defined meaning, that could be exploited to either
show these as text or provide descriptions somehow. But the usual
approach of cramming a bunch of stuff in a single glyph *is* a huge
downgrade compared to ASCII smileys and the like.
People were communicating with text for centuries before emojis were invented.
I have some Gnus settings to convert some of the glyphs of the kind //TRANSLIT can handle to something more capable of being displayed in a latin1 terminal, I should check if that could be useful for emojis.I am interested in this functionality, if it works with emojis. Please
The best thing I have so far, is using GNU Emacs' M-x describe-char
for knowing what an emoji means.
On Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:17:14 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
People were communicating with text for centuries before emojis were
invented.
What were these <https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/kn60r/infographic_26_prehistoric_cave_symbols_used/>,
do you think?
On 2026-06-06, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jun 2026 07:07:56 -0400, The True Melissa wrote:
Verily, in article <10vvnpd$1gkrk$1@dont-email.me>, did
ldo@nz.invalid deliver unto us this message:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
ASCII art can go anywhere ASCII can go. That should be fine.
Then you have to ask, why not simply allow Unicode?
Not allowing unicode *at all* would be a mistake, given that gives a
good solution to handle so many languages, even if considering just the
ones revolving around the latin alphabet! One could perhaps talk about limiting emoji usage, and then there's overuse of glyphs other than
emojis, like not using apostrophes (which are ASCII-compatible) and
instead using ASCII-incompatible glyphs that likely don't even have the
same meaning :-P
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> writes:
On 2026-06-06, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jun 2026 07:07:56 -0400, The True Melissa wrote:
Verily, in article <10vvnpd$1gkrk$1@dont-email.me>, did
ldo@nz.invalid deliver unto us this message:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:47:00 GMT, SpallsHurgenson(NG) wrote:
If I can add to that: text only too. No emoji, no images. Keep it
about the message, not the fluff.
No ASCII art? Only that?s been part of Usenet since practically the
beginning ...
ASCII art can go anywhere ASCII can go. That should be fine.
Then you have to ask, why not simply allow Unicode?
Not allowing unicode *at all* would be a mistake, given that gives a
good solution to handle so many languages, even if considering just the
ones revolving around the latin alphabet! One could perhaps talk about
limiting emoji usage, and then there's overuse of glyphs other than
emojis, like not using apostrophes (which are ASCII-compatible) and
instead using ASCII-incompatible glyphs that likely don't even have the
same meaning :-P
I`ve seen people mess up apostrophes with plain old ASCII too. ;)
On Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:17:14 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
People were communicating with text for centuries before emojis were invented.
What were these <https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/kn60r/infographic_26_prehistoric_cave_symbols_used/>,
do you think?
I`ve seen people mess up apostrophes with plain old ASCII too. ;)
On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 09:03:53 -0000 (UTC)
gmc@metro.cx (Koen Martens) wrote:
Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
That besides the point that even when displaying the full thread,
Mastodon's official UIs still don't display it as a thread, with
nesting. As an example http://threadtree.xyz does this but leaves out
attachments. I guess this one goes into the "wants to imitate twitter"
bucket?
I think so, but it just makes for poor interaction imho.
Brutaldon, first I hear about that one. Something to check out!
Might even enable browsing mastodon on low-bandwidth and/or high-latency >> > connections. Most of the troubles I've had with it have been because of
the instance itself, not because of brutaldon.
Ah, it's a web front-end for regular mastodon I see now. That still
doesn't take away my major beef with mastodon: it's a bloated piece
of ruby software that guzzles resources like it's no-one's business.
Not that friendica is particularly light though. Which is why I'm
intending to give snac and gotosocial a try. They are being advertised
as light-weight, so if their user experience is anywhere near decent it
might be interesting to switch over.
[]
What's wanted is a platform with a threaded heirarchal message
system^w^w^w^w an exact clone of Usenet that's fast and has lots of intelligent traffic, that attracts well behaved folk, yet keeps out the
troll idiots.
One can dream.
, --
Bah, and indeed Humbug.
I`ve seen people mess up apostrophes with plain old ASCII too. ;)
ITYM "I`ve seen people mess up apostrophe's with plain old ASCII too.".
On Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:42:40 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:
I`ve seen people mess up apostrophes with plain old ASCII too. ;)
ITYM "I`ve seen people mess up apostrophe's with plain old ASCII too.".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>
On 2026-06-08, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:42:40 +0000, Dennis Boone wrote:
I`ve seen people mess up apostrophes with plain old ASCII too. ;)
ITYM "I`ve seen people mess up apostrophe's with plain old ASCII too.".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law>
ITYM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%60s_law>
| Sysop: | Tetrazocine |
|---|---|
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| Messages: | 83,973 |