Phone bills were a problem for anyone using BBS:es, so FidoNet's hierarchial system was based on geography to ensure its users would only have to make local phone calls to access it. For example, I was a user node connected to a local BBS which in turn was connected to South Net which in turn was connected to Region Sweden which in turn was connected to Zone Europe. Cost minimization was very important since it was all driven by hobbyists and no one got paid for it.

For me, it was the first time I networked. You could send FidoMail to people all around the world and they would get the mail in a few days. The delay in delivery was because of buffering; each node in the network would only pull and push mail from and to their upstream once or twice a day to save on phone bills.

But the discussions were the amazing part of the network. Being able to read and participate in discussions with very smart people was very fun. Most groups were computer-related, but other topics like ham radio, religion, politics, sex and science were discussed too. There must have been thousands of messages posted to the network everyday.

Anyways, I was trying to find the archives (spurred to it after reading https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/) but there are none! :( No one has bothered to archive FidoNet and now that piece of computing history is lost forever. All the thousands of messages I and many others wrote vanished in the aether.

Perhaps people have caches of messages from that era on their old hard drives? It would be so cool if it was possible to put together an archive of it! Perhaps not? Perhaps someday someone pulls the plug on Hacker News site and then everything written here will be lost too?