> Has anyone typed up any sort of summary of these decades-old grievances.
> Reading a lot of these messages borders on psychedelic; there is obviously a
>lot of context and things people know or remember which I clearly missed in my
> many years away from Fidonet.

It's more like a book than a summary that I personaly, won't get into.

>The other thing - and I noticed this before I started reading this echo - is i
> is unclear what the canonical "fidonet website to rule them all is," with the
>expected fidonet.org site currently not working correctly.  If I am a new SysO
> and I want to join Fidonet, where would I begin?  Where are reliable modern
> instructions for this currently (if not ideally)?

Fidonet.org is the best known fido related website by google etc. but it's not
the oficial website of fidonet. There is no official website.

Recently fidonet.io went online with a goal of providing upto date content for
intersted folks to get info about fidonet and how to join.

> Just wonder if any of this is summarized anywhere.

I don't think so, and I hope not. You'd need to talk to folks in net/echomail
to get a better idea of what is, was and will be.

> Honestly: it makes me sad.  Fidonet is worth preserving (I think) as one of
> these unique things which is both a historical relic, but also as something
>useful technologically even today (not much is distributed in the sense Fidone
>is - most things are fairly centralized on the Internet), as well as something
> which has a unique culture.  My memories of it are fond: some of the first
> messages I ever received from distant places (Ivory Coast!) were through
> Fidonet in the early 90s.

I also have a fondness for fidonet for much the same reasons and feel as you
do. Fidonet has a long history and this is just a part of it.

> Is some kind of online summit possible, or desired to work through these
>problems, or is this a laughably naive thing that has been proposed before and
> laughed at?

I don't think there are any problems currently. Fidonet works like a champ and
we can communicate via netmail or echomail as we please.

Different folks communicate differently.

> Sorry if any of this is naive, but I really would like to hear a summary of
> what has caused all of these problems since I left Fidonet in around 1995.

>I know that any such telling would likely be controversial in and of itself bu
> am curious.

There is no quick and easy way to explain it to you, watch and see.

--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4