@jgoerzen My answer got lost so I'll make this short.

I remember Fidonet well. For PBS (LearningLink) I built a distributed, threaded BBS built on FidoNet (every night it collected the entries from 25? sites and aggregated them into a threaded discussion). Great fun.

I also ran Atlantic Palisades and was Wizop on PCMagNet (PC Magazine). I even made small contributions to Magpie.

Part of me misses usenet, though frankly, Mastodon really reminds me of it.

Oh man, I'm old.