JH> i've been told quite angrily that there is not a deficit of users and
 JH> it's only me that has that issue.  They are of course, delusional.

I discovered BBSes around 2019/2020 and I'm still here. Considering age and time when BBSes had prime time, I'm a newbie, but stubborn to stay.

I see new people coming in or who came around the same time as me. I discovered BBSes to be still a living thing thanks to the YT documentaries.
They did great job to help raise awareness.

But there is learning curve. Timeouts can be annoying and a blocker but not that much as general lazyness of people who are not expecting that this is like coming back to unix shell times when they started with IRC, just every board is a custom command and ansi design system, instead of posix. 

I've learnt all that to help me navigate easily and find differences between Synchronet and Mystic, Enigma, CNET or other.. but it was a bit of a challenge at the beginning.

 JH> 
 JH> i agree that these short timeouts on bbses are annoying, but there's
 JH> just been a huge slump in bbs users for 3 or more years.  there's just
 JH> other things to do out there that are more fun.

And that where the trick is, showing people where they are what BBS is in an attractive way and you may discover more nerds like me who get curious enough to at least try.

Nobody is delusional that BBS can become mainstream in online communication.
But it comes with an amazing blast from the past moment for everybody born up until 1985 I'd say.. the rest is unfortunately, more a Facebook generation and lost to this medium.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a copy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)