💾 Archived View for thelambdalab.xyz › phlog › 2024-08-16-Offline-BBSing.txt captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:25:01.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Offline BBSing -------------- Meet Felicity. Felicity is, first and foremost and like many who live predominantly off-grid, a gardener. She spends her time taking care of her plants and tending the soil around the self-built shed in the middle of the bush she calls home. Felicity is also captivated by "the relentless fascination of the computer." [1] She has a small low-power machine that every so often she uses to tinker with the code for the microcontrollers governing her solar array and battery bank and monitoring the various aspects of her garden. She also just likes to engage in fun programming experiments, an activity she finds relaxing in the same way that others find knitting. And every so often, Felicity likes to chat. Sure she can cycle the 20 km to the tiny town she occasionally visits, but none of the people she regularly meets there are at all interested in Felicity's odd technical fetishes. And sure, she could get some network connectivity out to her little home, but with that would inevitably come so much of the noisy bullshit she's out here to escape. Luckily, Felicity has a solution. Every week she rides the unsealed fire trail into the nearest town with a USB thumb drive stuffed in her pocket. There she walks into the town's only Newsagency. She says hello to the owner, Marge, who asks about her tomatoes. After some chitchat, Felicity sits down at the internet-connected PC Marge makes available as a service to the small community. She inserts her USB drive, runs a small program, then removes it. She bids Marge farewell, then rides home giddy with excitement, the thumb drive bursting with the nerdy community she craves. Felicity is an active member of the Offline BBS. And now you can be too! The Offline BBS is simply a message board which you can access using NNCP [2,3], the sneakernet-friendly network tool. (Alex Schroeder has an excellent quick-start document. [4]) Once you've sent me your public keys, you can send an nncp request to the Offline BBS node generate a QWK offline mail packet for you (just like the ones we used with BBSs in the 80s and 90s), which you can open at your leisure using BBS offline mail reader software (e.g. MultiMail [4]). Once you've finished - maybe weeks later! - you can send the generated reply file back to the Offline BBS node, which incorporates your new posts and replies back into the BBS for others to see. If you've not stopped reading already, you might very reasonably be wondering why on earth Felicity wouldn't just be using email and/or Usenet, instead of restricting herself to an obscure set of message boards hosted on a single NNCP node? After all, both email and Usenet newsgroups interact very nicely with NNCP, and there's already a lot of information available on how to set those up. I don't have a solid answer for this, other than to say that, for me, the smaller scale of BBSs (they were properly local back in the day) provided a stronger sense of _place_ than completely open message systems. The only people on the BBS were those who were in roughly the same area code and who could bother to dial in and make an account. Drive-by commenting was less of a problem, and communities could develop away from the pressure to cater to absolutely everyone. Maybe Felicity feels the same? ;) Ok, enough with the highfalutin justification. This is just a fun and weird little experiment to see how "BBS-y" I could make something that has no actual online (in the synchronous sense) BBS attached to it. I got inspired to do this after having gotten grumpy [6] about cgNAT preventing me from properly self-hosting and then learning about NNCP from Alex's recent posts. Aside from NNCP, the board is powered by a rough and highly non-idiomatic Lua program [7] which I hacked together while jet-lagged. If you're interested in NNCP and you're mad enough to give Offline BBS a try, I've put some instructions online at gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/0/offline.txt. (If only I'd done this a earlier this year, this could've been my OFFLFIRSOCH submission!) -- [1]: https://100r.co/site/computing_and_sustainability.html [2]: http://www.nncpgo.org [3]: https://complete.org/nncp [4]: gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02024-07-16-minimal-nncp-setup [5]: https://wmcbrine.com/MultiMail [6]: gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/0/phlog/2024-06-16-cgNAT-blues.txt [7]: gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/qwikboard