2023/6/7 -- Yesterday I ended up on this ridiculous rabbithole after a guy name PaULIE42o (yes spelled just like that) made a post on Lemmy that was both a history of BBS boards, and a guide to using them. I ended up being totally fascinated; an ancient message board/email system populated mainly by old tech nerds and a few weird young people? Sounds like a good time to me! I went on 3 BBS's: 2o fOr BeeRS, aBSINTHE, and The Quantum Wormhole. It took me a bit to figure out how to access these boards. The original lemmy post did have some great BBS clients (I ended up picking SyncTERM), but it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out how to enter BBS urls and ports into syncterm. Once I did have it figured out, I was blessed with incredible ascii art on login. All of these boards have amazing art that pushes the boundary of what you can do in a terminal. 

As well, I liked PaULIE's board tagline of "more social, less media", and it made me think that he has the right mentality. I yearn for the web before it was heavily commercialized, and this seems like a version of that. Furthermore, PaULIE's board had a section dedicated to the major Facebook data breach that happened in 2021, with full page ASCII protest art and a message discussing Facebook's lack of action towards those who were affected by the leak. They even host a copy of the data leaked, for the sake of making it easy to search through the data and see if your details are there. I found that rather inspiring and a very effective protest.

That being said, having no preexisting experience with BBS boards made it a bit tricky to navigate, especially as some stuff (like ctrl-z for a big options menu) wasn't too obvious to me. Nonetheless, I figured it out, and I even succeeding in emailing PaULIE himself, and responding to a couple of email threads. Once I had figured out how the first board (20 for beers) worked, the other two went much smoother. Overall, it was a really cool experience, and I may turn visiting BBS boards into a habit. If anyone reads this, and is curious about experiencing BBS boards yourself, I'm going to link here PaULie's post of lemmy, as he explain how to join relatively* well: https://beehaw.org/post/435922

* the board urls are presented in a url.com:0000 format, but when inputting it into SyncTERM, you should enter in just the url under "address" and the numbers go into "TCP port". That might be really obvious to people who have experience with this sort of thing, but it took me half an hour to figure out.