alt Hacker NewsThere was a FidoNet clone in Turkey called HitNet (short for “Hi Türkiye Net”). Its node addresses were like “8:103/119”.
İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived.
HitNet introduced me to great people some of whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.
The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.
Forgot to add, I also developed a BlueWave-compatible offline-reader called Wolverine that worked for all Fido-style networks: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine
It was quite popular in Turkey in the 90's.
You can try it out in DOSBox here with some random HitNet packages: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine/releases/tag/2.32