On Starting: How a BBS Led Me Here
There is a WWIV 5.8 bulletin board system running on a Debian VPS somewhere on the internet. It has a handful of message subs (small web, fediverse, self-hosting, Linux), a modest file section, and online door games piped in through BBSLink and DoorParty. You can reach it by firing up a telnet client, something most people haven't done since the Clinton administration.
That BBS is mine. It's called RetroBoard BBS, and for the better part of a year, almost nobody has used it.
That's not a complaint. It's context.
I stood it up because I grew up on BBSs. Back in the late eighties I was the young adult with a 2400 baud modem dialing into local boards at odd hours, watching text scroll down the screen like it meant something... because it did. That was where I cut my teeth in tech. Where I first understood that a computer could be a door to other people, other ideas, other ways of thinking. The BBS wasn't just a hobby. It was the beginning of something I've been chasing ever since.
So when I discovered that WWIV was still being actively developed, that you could run a proper old-school BBS in 2025 and connect it to a live network of other boards, I did what any reasonable person with nostalgia and a VPS would do. I built one.
And then I waited.
The silence wasn't surprising, not really. Telnet is a barrier. BBS navigation is a barrier. The whole paradigm is a barrier for anyone who didn't live it the first time around. I knew this going in. I told myself it didn't matter, that the act of building it was enough, that maybe a handful of curious people would wander through.
A handful did. Briefly. They logged in, looked around, and left. No posts. No return visits. The message subs sat empty. The door games logged a few plays. The file section went untouched.
I spent a while trying to brainstorm ways to bridge the gap...connect the BBS to the fediverse, sync message subs to Mastodon, build an activity feed, set up a Gemini capsule as a front porch. All reasonable ideas. All adding complexity to something that hadn't proven it needed more features. It needed people, and features don't conjure people.
What it forced me to ask was a harder question: what am I actually trying to build here, and why?
The BBS was nostalgia. Real, genuine nostalgia, and I don't mean that dismissively. Nostalgia can be a legitimate compass. But nostalgia for the feeling of something isn't the same as a reason to rebuild it. What I was nostalgic for wasn't telnet. It was the texture of those early online spaces. Text-first. Unhurried. Personal. Communities that formed around shared curiosity rather than shared outrage. Places that felt like somewhere rather than everywhere.
That thing still exists. It's just not on a BBS. It's scattered across Mastodon instances and tilde communities and Gemini capsules and hand-coded personal sites that load in under 50 kilobytes. The small web. The indie web. Whatever you want to call the part of the internet that never forgot what the internet was supposed to feel like.
I'd been circling it for a while. Reading it. Occasionally participating in it across too many platforms, never quite finding the sweet spot between too specific and too varied, always context-switching, always a little scattered.
The other thing I had to admit was simpler and maybe more honest: I like building things.
Not just using them. Building them. Designing them. Making decisions about structure and aesthetics and what goes where and why. That itch doesn't go away just because the thing you built didn't find an audience. It finds the next thing to build.
So instead of asking how to save the BBS, I started asking a different question. What would it look like to build a home on the web that actually fits the range of things I care about, tech and tinkering, music, history, philosophy, fiction, the long weird intersection of all of it, without having to scatter myself across five platforms to cover the bases? What would it look like to do that without ads, without tracking, without the fingerprints of the attention economy all over it?
It would look, I think, something like this.
This site is called Reality in Exile. The name was sitting in a drawer, so to speak, I'd registered it a while back for a project that never quite materialized. It fits better here than it did there. There's something about the phrase that captures the feeling I'm after: a perspective slightly outside the mainstream current of things, not cynical, not contrarian, just a little to the side of wherever the crowd is facing.
What you'll find here: writing, mostly. Posts about tech and self-hosting and the small web. Posts about music and what it does to a person. Posts about history and philosophy and whatever is demanding to be written about on a given week. A forum for people who want to stay and talk, kept small and invitation-based because small and intentional beats large and noisy every time. A fediverse presence through the blog, so you can follow along from Mastodon or wherever without needing to check back manually.
What you won't find: ads, tracking scripts, algorithmic anything, social share buttons, cookie banners, engagement metrics, or any of the other furniture that makes the modern web feel like a shopping mall that got lost and wandered into your living room.
RetroBoard BBS is still running, by the way. It'll stay up. It's part of the story of how this place came to exist, and there's something fitting about having a working telnet BBS linked from a site like this, a curiosity, a relic, a reminder of where the thread started. If you know what to do with it, the door is open.