BBSes were pre-public internet, not part of the internet. The connected ones were a separate network in and of themselves. I ran a WWIV BBS in the late 80s to early 90s that had its own networking system allowing communication, and even file sharing between instances. It was pretty sophisticated for the time, but hella slow over my 14.4k modem.

WWIV did migrate to using the internet for connection, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps that’s what you were considering with this comment?

I moved to Reddit when Digg destroyed itself. It wasn’t too hard to make the switch, although it did take a bit of getting used to. I imagine it’ll be the same this time, or maybe a bit easier, as the format of lemmy.ml is not too different in appearance from Reddit.