Glad to see you, All!

This is why we see a fairly large number of BBS systems with a potentially almost infinite number of "nodes" to handle traffic, and yet the majority of the traffic on the discussion lists (Exho Boards) is test traffic to the test echo, political wrangling and cooking recipes. The other echos that gain traffic are the adverts for boards and the automatic announcements of new files, primarily files related to running BBSes such as Nodelists and statistics. There are very few actual users.
We've seen a proliferation of messaging applications or groups over the past few years, but BBS and Fido can't seem to attract more than a few thousand people. That should tell us something needs to be different.
If you delve into the history of FidoNet there are two things I'd like to highlight about why and how it arose in the way it did and relate that to some of the important factors that we are seeing at play right now.
The first one was that Rob Jennings, who invented FidoNet practically single-handedly, designed it intentionally to be anarchistic. As is normal, when it Gee it developed what looks at first glance very much like a hierarchical structure and a central controlling body. This is because of old limitations, the benefit of consolidating messages to save on long-distance phone calls, and simple human nature. The first condition is simply jot there any more. Out of the entire list of nodes on the latest nodelists, there is a bare handful which advertise an actual phone number. The second will always be with us, and has to also be taken into account.
The second factor is that if the monolithic centralized services which provide the various messaging systems in use today; from Twitter to WhatsApp and everything else in between. They have arisen as commercial purveyors of other peoples information and treat their customers as the product. From my reading and experience I suspect that it was an almost prescient vision which formulated the concept of FidoNet; one truly before it's time.

*Transmission
*In my opinion, FidoNet at its core is a store-and-forward system which was meant to resilient and flexible enough to route around outages and breakdowns and unreliable links. The first nodelist could apparently jot handle more than 250 nodes, and the zone/net/hub/node system arose almost as a kludge to handle the growth to over 19000 entries in the nodelist at its peak.
When I established my newest board, I was invited to join my local zone and facilitate the local region, with the assumption that all my traffic would, as is traditional, route through the region to the Zone hub and then onto the "backbone". As I proceeded to set this up, I found it completely trivial to add feeds to and from Europe, Russia and New Zealand for conferences carried there and not within my Zone. I could also have picked up all my conferences from one of those and simply ignore everyone else in my Zone. I thought that was a little ride though. It is only tradition that restricted me to using the normal routing.
So to summarize;
1 Anarchic (no central authority)
2 Store and forward (handle unreliable or sporadic connections)
3 Robust and flexible routing (based on available links, not on arbitrarily decided hierarchical structures)
And I'd like to add
4 Total user selection of what they want to see, and technical decisions where and how it is routed.

*Some tentative suggestions
*I'm not truly an expert in all of this stuff, more a generalist and an enthusiastic amateur, so please take that into consideration.
What I believe is imperative is that the barrier to entry needs to be lowered drastically. It should be as simple as clicking on a download button and filling in a few fields.
We need to think in terms of Mesh networking, not some sort of star topology mindset. I'm not necessarily talking about the transport layer, but the arrangement of the network. By this I mean that someone should choose to join the network and connect automatically to peers. These could be geographically distant but close in network terms or vice versa.

*** [Netmail-to-Telegram address: 474405162@2:460/256]

... Tag, you are IT!
--- tg BBS v0.6.4
* Origin: Fido by Telegram BBS from Stas Mishchenkov (2:460/256)