Hello Anne,
Thank you for your posting about Fidonet. It is of some
concern to me as well since my acess to this echo is
dependent right now on my local BBS which almost went
down in July. The sysop has a demanding new job and little
time to deal with his system. Usership is down quite
dramatically due to the advent of local Internet access.
A year and a half ago there was no local phone call access
to the Internet from my area. You could send email through
the Fidonet gateway, but that was it.
Today there areat least a dozen Internet Service Providers
(ISP's) available by local phone call.  We also have local
access to the Greater Detroit Freenet and several other
free services like the Michigan Electronic Library  and the
various free email services like Juno and Freemark. In
addition the public library offers free internet access from
machines at the library and the public schools were connected
with a county wide network that gives teachers and students
access.
In this environment it is difficult for a BBS to attract
callers who are willing to donate moneyin even nominal
ammounts to keep itself online.
BBS operators who want to grow their systems have to provide
Internet access, and, as you can see from my examples, there
is now a ton of competition.
I think more access to online computer information and
software is wonderful. It is hard to be unhappy about
this situation, even though it has had a negative impact
on Fidonet.
An interesting analogy could be made to the situation with
the Usenet Newsgroups. Usenet actually predates the Internet
and originally the newsgroups were traded by university
computers telephoning each other at intervals. Most Usenet
traffic now travels via the Internet, but not all of it does.
When it looked like my local BBS was going down I started to
investigate how I could maintain access to Fidonet and discovered
that my best bet was a local account with an ISP.
With an Internet account I could easily telnet to hundreds of
different BBS's with Fidonet echoes. Or I could with more
difficulty download the echoes of interest by FTP from
various sites.
I think the strength of Fido is the willingness of the community
to share information on a friendly volunteer basis. That's
going to continue even if we access the echoes by telneting to
a BBS outside of our local telephone area. There will be fewer
BBS's but more traffic and more communication. That's what
happened with the Usenet newgroups.
As a note to Chris, I'd like to say that even if this thread
seems way off topic it is important to discuss it here because,
as Anne points out, many people are concerned about maintaining
access to this echo.
Regards,
Sam Ewalt
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