It's interesting stuff though. I suspect that relatively little has been saved from the BBS days in part because it was so decentralized--although I'm not aware of Compuserve and the like ever having made archives public either. The situation is a bit better on the early Internet side but even there Usenet archives are incomplete--and were very nearly even more incomplete.
I agree that the attempts at decentralisation are so-so but I do think it's critical that the low-level pieces are done properly. Once they're deployed, every wart and bottleneck becomes magnified. It's easy to have a 'move fast and break things' mentality for a centralised service because there's an army of people with access to everything so they can peer in, monitor and fix breakages. Not quite the same for a decentralised system.
Another way of thinking about the network side is that we already have many of them. Address books, emails, services etc all of which contain different subsets. If we can recreate the existing services with a resilient, decentralised alternatives then that can form the bedrock on which to build further things. FWIW, I'm working with others on an open source stack that can do this [1]. We're starting with the core services of mail, contacts and calendars (to replace iCloud), but the stack itself is very flexible and built using Mirage [2].
What's a shame is how much people in the beginning created to share with people -- it cost money to run these BBSes let alone call into others. The Internet as a whole was built similarly where protocols like email allowed a diversity of providers and people to talk regardless of implementation/account.
Now I'm seeing a complete commercializations of all communication, from Facebook owning a giant chunk of social to now even with slack I see on product hunt some list of semi-public channels replicating what IRC has done for years. Attempts as decentralized social networks haven't gone anywhere because it's been protocol first, implementation & network effect later (not to mention all trying to clone fb or Twitter versus having a differentiated experience). Plus everyone in a mobile non-html world just wants to own the next big thing.
We need more Mozillas out there doing things beyond the web to get communication out of the hands of individual companies and into the greater public. With blockchains, oauth, json, and cloud storage the tech is there to do interesting stuff. We need now someone that already has the network to step forward.