Glad to see you, All!

To illustrate what I mean, my next point is that we need to be agnostic about the transfer layer. It is trite to say that the ubiquitous nature of TCP/IP will most probably dominate for a long time, but consider this scenario.

*Scenario 1
*There is a remote village, physically distant from any network connection whatsoever. There are no phone lines, no satellite links, no cell towers not for fifty miles in any direction.
One person in that village has an android device of some sort (phone tablet or whatever). That person gets to go into the local town once a week. When they get there, they connect their device to the network. The software on their device then sends and receives all the packets waiting on the queue. Something like Bink does now.
When this person gets back to the village, his next door neighbor connects to his android device from his phone using Bluetooth, and swaps Mail. He will have a week to read and reply before connecting again before the next trip. Another person from the village in the next valley visits the next day. He does the same before returning to his village to continue the process.
Maybe at the third village in the chain, there is someone else who takes a trip to get connected and passed on the nail that's accumulated. (That's a routing complication of course but not insurmountable).

The point of this scenario is to illustrate that the current concept of dialup BBS (now shifted to Telnet et al) is in some ways a shift away from the roots of FidoNet. This disconnected store and forward model is what the network was designed for.
*More Proposals and thoughts
*My proposal is that we need to look for a different network authentication and routing model. One that handles the instant connectivity just well as it does the completely irregular and unreliable links.
? It's also become clear that there is reason to be concerned about the platforms that provide the major communications at the moment. We've seen these platforms being used in places and at tokes where they've made an incredible difference, such as during the Arab Spring, the Hong Kong protests and then during various natural disasters etc. We've also seen them be cut off completely by governments or by the providers to whole communities or to individuals.
? The anarchic nature of FidoNet was designed to prevent that. I'm also pretty convinced that when it was designed the initial intention of the Internet/DARPAnet played a part that is to survive a nuclear attack.
We need to return to that.
? One of the largest concerns people have expressed is worry over "encryption". What they truly mean is not encryption per se, but privacy. That, in my opinion, shouldn't be part of the network but a software layer on top. PGP comes to mind as a good model. Building that in to clients should be a best practice and part of the standard.
? It seems that most people establish a BBS primarily for their own use. That is that they are the primary user, and additional users are pretty sparse. It's for this reason (and others) that I'd suggest that the focus should be catering for this. There is of course a reason to have "community activities", but no reason why they need to be hosted by a central server. They could be collaborative efforts arranged on the fly.
? I do believe that there will be some central nodes. There is a certain pleasure is running a BBBs and facilitating the various services, and that should be as easy to accomplish as possible of course.
? The whole concept of the nodelist is archaic. Once a user or system has Registerd themselves on the app, there should be an automated process where it announces them to the network at large and where the information gets collated via a distributed database of some sort. The SBBS BBS list is an example of one way of doing this. A UDP packet once a day to announce the node and one every "tick" minutes with the nodes status might work. With auto discovery of "backbone nodes" that will collate and redistribute that information.

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... Tag, you are IT!
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