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Laughs in BBS

or

Laughs in Newgroups

Web Rings. Remember those?

They're making a comeback, somehow: https://webring.xxiivv.com/

Oh, I love this.

Throwing this in the "fun retro internet" pile alongside https://neocities.org/

Neocities has been around for years now.. I have a website there.. I do wonder if it's getting bigger though.

Seems like every old school platform is getting some sort of resurgence these days, and honestly it's understandable - the collapse of modern social media has created a wave of nostalgia for the good old days of the dot com era.

I still use both. 99% of Usenet is spam, but there still a few active groups (especially under comp.*). The BBS scene on the other hand, is booming. I see new users every week on my favourite board.

Are they doing BBS-over-SSH these days, or do you need a dial-up modem to participate?

Sadly most people CAN'T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.

How does a current day BBS work? Landline phone connections are a thing of the past here.

telnet or ssh (usually telnet)

If you're connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you're connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.

Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there's the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.