I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere

Same, but at the same time I'm glad data about me from that period of my life no longer persists.

There is non-zero chance it's on the tape sitting on the shelf in some unknown warehouse.

Rip my dignity in that case lol

> I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)

Say more!

I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.

I ran a couple of very local BBSes late beyond the hayday in the 14.4-56k timeframe. That got me into BBS software, which got me into ANSI Art, which got me into associations with warez groups, and that got me into association with various hacker collectives. Had it not been for the BBS scene I probably wouldn't work in technology today.

I'd love to read it when you're done!

The might or might not is a critical part of why the panopticon works..

Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.

Snap isn't a new idea but the motivation, to my understanding, is completely different. It was a technical limitation in the usenet days, both hdd space and bandwidth. Goodness I can still remember what one user on alt.binaries could do to our university network in the 90s.

Usenet archives exist

https://olduse.net/ Experience legacy usenet in real-time. You can subscribe to different start points and receive posts as they were sent, 40+ years ago.

I'll do my duty and provide some links as a fellow spelunker (apologies if you've already seen some of these):

http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available (https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289)

https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...

https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/

https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294

https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine

https://defacto2.net/bbs

https://web.archive.org/web/20241210143429/http://sysopshub....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBD-U-9PIg

Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.

The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!

What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.

The network was basically point to point serial, with a phone number for routing.

Some BBS hosts were quite sophisticated, running multiple computers and banks of modems to handle multiple user connections.

I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.

I was there in the early 2010s and we did have older versions of AIM, netscape in an archive CVS (svn was the day to day system when I started). But then we moved to git and only stuff that had a designated owner got moved from cvs/svn to git so there was another round of losing old source code. And another in the migration to yahoo systems post merger.

> I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.

However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)