Yup. I was reading one of them and I was like wow. It kind of makes me wish I had experienced that tech era in the early 90s, but I was only a toddler at the time. Today we have Tildes (https://tildeverse.org/) that try to resemble that old BBS community vibe.

In the first volume of the BBS magazine I have available there, I was surprised with how many women were involved in the BBS scene. There were at least three women who were column authors in that issue and one woman on the BBS development team (they have a photo in the beginning of the issue). I’m sure they had to contend with even worse casual sexism and misogyny in those communities than there is today. Nowadays it seems like more men are aware of the sexism we’ve internalized and are trying to be better.

The page design of the directory listings are built in to the web server software. So this isn’t something you can add to Nginx or Apache. There is a way to change the appearance of how files from the directory listing are displayed, but you’d need to use PHP or JavaScript with CSS or something to implement a front-end for it, and it wouldn’t be anything you’d add to the web server configuration. If you look at https://beta.the-eye.eu/public/, they are using JavaScript and CSS to implement a dynamic front-end for the directory listing.

If you use Caddy web server, you don’t need Nginx. Caddy and Nginx are both web servers. I prefer Caddy over Nginx, Apache, and other web servers because of its simplicity and the ability to have automatic HTTPS.

I’m using the Caddy web server. Yeah, the directory listing is more aesthetically satisfying than other web server software. I also like how it shows the sizes of the files as a bar with the number inside it so you can visually see size comparisons between the files.

I self host my own website, blog, and a dozen privacy-friendly alternatives and front-ends to various web sites. I use a dedicated remote server for this, so nothing is on my own bare metal. netcup.de has a variety of VPS options that give you good hardware resources for your money. You can get a VPS with 8 GB of RAM, 4 core CPU, 256 GB disk, and 2.5Gbps network throughput for $6.33 a month (not including initial setup cost). Compared to what Vultr and Akamai offer for the same price, this is a steal. The company is based in Germany, so you have to convert the euro prices to US dollars if you’re in the US. The only thing about netcup.de is that your options for the location of your server are limited. They have one US location and the rest are in Europe. This is not a dealbreaker for me, though. And they guarantee 99% uptime. I’m pleased with their service. If you just want to host your personal services on a more long term basis and don’t care about scaling and deployment turnover, then netcup is great. Akamai, Digital Ocean, and Vultr are more for short term disposable, scalable VPSes or web apps and they have excellent data center availability.