How well did FidoNet work? It's not quite as fast as federation over TCP/IP, but looks like it solved a lot of issues on paper.

It worked surprisingly well (as did some of the other BBS message networks of the time). Sure it took a bit for messages to traverse the network, however most of that was to try to reduce on cost per minute long distance.

Ironically, much of the things that people are learning and experiencing with the FediVerse have straightforward precursors from FidoNet, such as: the idea of supporting one's local sysop; or the idea that not everyone uses the same off-line reader program, or BBS software; or the idea that it's important to know what country's laws apply to a node.

FidoNet at its height was tens of thousands of nodes, worldwide, with each node supporting userbase sizes ranging from the single digits to the triple. Discussions could and did span the planet.

And yes, there was all the same culture shock, then as now, for people coming from the worlds of BIX and CompuServe, where a business provided and regulated a single centralized system, to a world where tens of thousands of people worldwide supported a decentralized system, sometimes in their spare time and out of their own pockets, and one had to (gasp!) pick a sysop that one liked and trusted or go the whole hog and run a node onesself with no-more-complex-than-hobby-level software and equipment that was readily available.

Usenet was also a social network. And it was much bigger than any BBS.

There will never again be a social network of any size with an average IQ that high.