Who builds one
Under 18? This is the good bit. There is a page written for you: what a bulletin board is, why building one is a weekend well spent, and how to do it with a grown-up at home. It starts here.
Everyone. That is not a dodge, it is the answer: a boardShort for bulletin board, a BBS. On this site, one BBS and the community that meets on it. is a room, and all you need to run one is to want a room.
What follows is who is already well served by that, and why. If you are not on the list, the list is not the point. The point is that a chip the size of a postage stamp and a USB cable is now the entire cost of having a place of your own on the internet.
Schools, and anything with STEM in the name
A board is a live network you can hold in your hand. Children reach it from a school computer or from a phone, and what they are using is not an app with a company behind it. It is a machine somebody in the room owns, running software they can read.
- It is the internet with the lid off. A student connects to an address and a port, types, and the words come back. That is the whole of it, and it is the same thing underneath every website they have ever used. One lesson on a board explains more about how the internet works than a term of using it.
- It is community driven rather than engagement driven. Nothing on a board is designed to keep anybody there. There is no feed, no recommendation, no notification engineered to pull somebody back, no score. People talk to each other and then they log off. That is a different relationship with a computer than the one social media teaches, and children notice quickly once they have both to compare.
- The whole thing is legible. The user list is a text file. The settings are a text file. A class can read the source, change a screen, add a command, and put the changed board back on the air inside one lesson. Nothing is hidden behind an account or an API key.
- It costs less than a set of textbooks. Ten people can be on one board at once, so a class works in pairs or threes, or runs a second board. Old machines out of the back of a supply closet can join it, which is often the best part of the lesson.
A board is a closed room unless somebody sets up port forwardingA router setting that lets people outside your home reach one device inside it, on one numbered port. on purpose, which lets people outside the building in. Run it on the school network and it is reachable from the school and nowhere else, which for a classroom is usually the right answer. What opening it up means.
Teaching with it? There is a page for that: five lesson plans with durations and equipment lists, what each session teaches, what a set of boards costs, and a straight answer about school networks and port forwarding. It treats designing and printing an enclosure as a real part of the project, because for a lot of classrooms that is the hook. Read the page for teachers.
Clubs and groups
Ham radio
Hams already run their own infrastructure, so this needs no explaining: it is one more thing you own, on a shelf, answering calls. A club board carries the net schedule, the repeater details, exam notes, contest logs, swap and shop, and a chat room for the evenings between meetings. Members reach it from a laptop, from a shack computer, or from a phone.
There is history here too. Packet BBSes were how amateur radio did store-and-forward long before most people had an email address, and a lot of the people who ran them are still licensed. This is the same idea on cheaper hardware, and the ham radio pages have the plan for packet callers, coming in firmware 1.3.0.
And the rest
The same shape fits any group that meets sometimes and wants somewhere to be in between:
- Retro computing and vintage machine groups, who can join it from the hardware the board was built to answer.
- Makerspaces and hackerspaces, for the door code, the tool list, and the argument about who broke the laser cutter.
- Model railway, radio control, astronomy, photography, and any other club whose members already own more equipment than sense.
- Writers' groups swapping drafts through the file area.
- Games nights, chess ladders, tabletop groups planning the next session.
- A neighbourhood, a street, an apartment building, a boat club, a community garden.
- Preppers, off-grid and emergency communications groups, who want something that works on a local network with no provider involved at all.
- A conference, a festival, a field day: a board that exists for a weekend and then goes in a drawer.
Offices and teams
A chat room and a place to leave a message, running on hardware you own, with no seats to buy and nobody's terms of service to agree to.
It works on anything with a terminal, which in an office means every machine there is: a laptop, a workstation, a server you already ssh into, the ancient thing in the corner that runs the one piece of software nobody will replace. There is no rollout. A telnet clientA free app for joining a board: it connects to the board's address and shows its screens., the free app for joining, is small, often already on the machine, and anybody who can open one can join. They are listed on the apps for joining page.
- Group discussion that stays in the building. Put it on the local network and it never touches the internet at all.
- It does not go down when a service does. There is no service.
- Nothing is being retained for anybody's purposes but yours. No analytics, no third party, no export to a company you have never dealt with. The host's log of who connected, the sysopThe system operator: the host who runs a board, sets its rules and looks after it.'s caller log, is the whole record and it is yours.
- Labs, workshops and machine rooms that already have serial consoles everywhere are the easiest sell of all: the board speaks the same language as the switch in the rack.
One person, one board
Plenty of boards are one person and eleven friends. That was true in 1985 and it is true now.
Run a file area for the things you collect: a micro SD card of up to 32 GB holds a shared library of disk images, text files and utilities, every one a download even to a computer from the 1980s (by XMODEM or YMODEM, the way those machines always did it). Run a chat room for the people you actually want to talk to. Leave mail for each other. Keep a board of your own notes that you can reach from anything, anywhere, without a browser and without a third party in the middle. The only record of who called and for how long is the board's own caller log, and the board is yours.
It is on the internet, and it is nothing like the web. No page loads, no cookies, no scripts, no account with anybody, no advertising, nothing between you and the machine. A socket and some characters.
A board with a camera
A board can look out of the window: a camera board has the camera built in, and from firmware 1.2.0 a camera sat adds one to any board with an SD card. A visitor types SNAPSHOT, from a laptop or from an 8-bit machine, and the board takes a photo of whatever it is pointed at, ready to download. (An 8-bit machine can take the picture. Looking at it is a job for a PC.)
- Outdoors. On a porch, in a shed window, beside a weather station: visitors connect to see whether it is raining where the board is.
- Wildlife. Point it at a feeder, a trail or a nest box and let visitors catch the visitors. Set it to take a picture every few minutes, and a spring on a nest box becomes a timelapse.
- Motion. From firmware 1.2.0 a camera sat with a PIR motion sensor takes the picture by itself when something moves.
You are the king of everything on the board
This is the part worth being plain about.
You decide what the board is called, what it is for, who is welcome, what is allowed, and what happens to anybody who ignores that. Not a policy team. Not a moderation contractor. Not an appeals process somebody else designed. You.
Host whatever topics you want: there is no provider, so there are no provider's terms. Nobody can deplatform you, it can run almost off grid on a local network and a battery, and it keeps answering after the company that made it is gone. Each one is explained under the freedoms on What this is.
It is decentralized in the way that matters. Every board is independent. There is no central server, no company, no network anybody owns. Boards do not talk to each other today, and that is the honest version: what there is instead of a network is that nobody needs one. Chat rooms that link across boards are on the roadmap, and a link will be two boards choosing each other, not a network anybody owns. Listing a board in the directory is optional, the protocol behind it is published, and you are welcome to run your own. That is the intended outcome, not a grudging permission.
So set one up
The barrier used to be a second phone line. Now it is an ESP32 dev board and a USB cable, plus a micro SD card if you want file areas or forums. That is the list. There is no hosting bill, no domain required, no provider to ask, and no account with anybody.
You install the software by flashingWriting the software onto the board's chip over a USB cable. Here your browser does it for you. it from your browser, give it your Wi-Fi, and it is ready. Change one setting on your router, forwarding one port, and people outside your home can join it from anywhere in the world. Leave that port closed and it serves your house, your club room or your classroom and nothing else. Both are a real board and you can change your mind either way in a minute.
From firmware 1.2.2 the board can ask the router for that setting itself, so on a router that answers there is no router menu in it at all.
The whole thing takes an afternoon, most of which is deciding what to call it. If you know the BBS software that runs on a PC, what is different about this one fits on a page.
Join one with a free app, and browse the communities online that is up right now. Yours could be on that list by the weekend.