I ran the Lost Cities from about 1989 to 1992, renamed to Center of the Universe till about 1995 (till a "hard card" crash -- on Tandy 1000 early hard drive, they had this "hard card" option with the drive attached on an expansion card). But I also recognized the transition to the internet coming after using OS/2 Warp throughout 1994, multitasking on a PC before Win95 came out. This was in Gainesville, Florida (UF). Used various BBS software (including QuickBBS) but primarily forked my own Turbo Pascal-based software using Forum BBS as a baseline.
I think one of the major forgotten things about a BBS is how it tied up a phone line. And because of this, user accounts typically had a time limit to how long they could be on. At think at my peak, I got maybe 30 calls a day on average - each person using less than 30 minutes. And one highlight was running some D&D campaigns (hosted by a local fireman!). Two popular "games" were TradeWars and ThePit (probably the only two that I registered :D ). I think modern social media could learn a lesson from this time-limitation - we take 24/7 connectivity for granted today (and basically unlimited connected sessions), but it seems to me that sites like FB, etc. should somehow offer a "daily time limit" or "daily post limit", maybe it would help people slow down and think about what they are about to say a little bit more...
Another aspect about BBS and using the old phone lines: not having to enter an area code. Implicitly, you only connected to a BBS that was in your local area -- and this mean all the other connected users were generally from your local area as well. While the internet has made us all "more connected", and yet I know more about stuff going on 1000 miles away than I do on things just down the street from me.
One of the best BBS's still running that I've seen recently is Absinthe BBS (accessible via telnet and in WiModems on my vintage systems), hosted on an Amiga. It has a lot of just fun little features that modern social media doesn't have -- for example, when you log off, you have the option to add a paragraph to a story (where the previous user did the same), so throughout a day each user evolves this story. It's a simple little thing, but we did stuff like that in middle school (passed around a paper notebook, each person adds a paragraph), and you end up with these crazy sequences of stories can are often a lot of fun. It's just one feature of Absinthe that I thought was clever -- they also have this point system, and "inter-BBS" chat, lots of stuff.
The "largest" BBS I ever connected to (not counting something like CompuServe) was Dragon Keep, with at least 8-16 lines in its heyday, and offered multi-user chat and early text-based MMOs. They had FidoNet, and one of the earliest BBS's that I knew of that could set you up with an "email address" (yea new stuff in those days!). At a local Tech Conference, the SysOps sold T-shirts. I still have mine, and here is the logo/image they had -- curious if someday anyone else runs across this and remembers them, they had an ASCII art of this logo every time you logged in.