So, I did indeed fall down a rabbit hole. I got my BBS recompiled and upgraded and now it's spewing MQTT messages at the mosquitto broker that lives in my Home Assistant node.
Also rebuilt the Dockerfile that I was using from scratch, which seems quite a bit simpler now. So far, so good, all my Door games still work with dosemu too.
And, yeah, I see that MQTT messages are sent when the sysop gets paged by a user. So that's one lego piece toward some shenanigans
I'm reading that Windows 10 end-of-life is going to be an e-waste disaster as folks are apparently throwing computers out. And I'm like - hey, where's the dumpster? I'm set to dive
I've been slowly getting myself up to speed on small-factor PCs to finally join the homelab hobby and set myself up a k8s cluster. These old Windows 10 computers should run Linux just fine, lemme have some if you're just gonna scrap 'em
Since my ADHD has swerved back into caring about this BBS that I've had running for a few years, I woke up this morning with a goofy idea for a semi-dystopian sci-fi story where folks fall back to using BBSes and fidonet to communicate because the internet got too fubar'd to use
@t36s Alas, I'm not sure. I've had Apple and Dell laptops over the last few years. They all seem pretty quiet? But also get really hot and throttle down performance because of it
Also, another description also occurred to me around why I favor ActivityPub / Mastodon over ATProto / Bluesky.
ATProto / Bluesky is decentralized but hierarchical - the data flows up through ever larger and more expensive nodes.
ActivityPub / Mastodon is decentralized but holographic - every node is a self-contained instance of the whole.
Dial-up BBSes were holographic, back in the day. Each one was a self-contained and complete community. Many of them could interlink. None was authoritative
Like, I do think ATProto has some cool stuff around it and some neat affordances from a global firehose.
But it seems like the main tradeoff is you have to deal with weirdos at the chokepoints toward the top and have to hope they're good weirdos. That, or hope other weirdos can build more big alternative high-altitude nodes
Also, I really like this notion about posts not going viral but "fungal" on the fediverse.
I seem to remember messages on BBS nets back in the day would take a lil while to ripple out, too, so similar things would happen
@skippy Well, it's been a long long time since I played with fidonet proper. But I *do* have my synchronet BBS hooked up to DOVE-Net, which is pretty easy to set up
@MLE_online @mitten FWIW, there are lots of BBSes still out there today. The main downside is that, like HAM radio, it's mostly weird old dudes chatting 😅
Also I remember the first time I logged onto IRC and talked to someone in Finland. Blew my mind
@arcadus i can smell this picture
@Extra_Special_Carbon My one saving grace is that I have a basement that keeps me from leaving them on the kitchen table
@jalefkowit @mathowie There was one dumb summer, almost 7 years ago (ugh!), when they did a marathon of Knight Rider on Twitch. I watched it almost every day on a laptop on the corner of my desk, if only for the chat
@AncTreat5358 Eh, you can use a telnet/ssh terminal that plays a .wav file when it connects 😅
Dang it, I got myself killed in both LoRD and Netrunner for the day on my BBS. I probably *could* cheat since I'm the sysop, but... (I should get back to work)
@twipped I think pretty much yeah - you can have a single IRC server and have plenty enough to chat with. And admins of interlinked IRC servers have to collaborate to set up shared rules
@b3lt3r I know I had one (1) bitcoin mined on a hard drive somewhere that I've never been able to find, mined via CPU way way back when it first came out. It annoys me to this day
Catsby is drooling on my tablet because he thinks he's getting some of my lunch #cats
Instead, he's getting a Churu because people food has been making him puke recently
@ansate What CSA did you join? We wanted to get into one earlier this year, but procrastinated too long and all the ones we tried were filled up :sadness:
@ansate We ate too much delivery pizza this summer, so I think we need to do the opposite 😅
I really, really need to pry myself out of the house and get to the Coffin bar someday. I'm probably not cool enough these days, but dang I like the cut of their jib
@tankgrrl i'm so tired
@tomjennings I suddenly got an ADHD urge to screw around with a BBS again lately, there must be something in the air
@benbrown ESP32s are unreasonably fun little widgets
@Wrewdison @benbrown Hmm, I have a spare ESP32 lying around here somewhere... 🤔
@progrium There's at least one bridge project I know of? But that gets tricky when things move from technical to cultural context collapse 😅
(e.g. like when some activitypub folks *like* their slow propagation and don't *want* to show up in global firehoses)