Former 2:5034/16 here.

I was born too late and missed most of the fun, but still managed to catch the trailing end of fidonet in the late 2000s. Pretty much everything was over IP already, there wasn't a single proper dial-up node in my local network (which was pretty small already, around 20 nodes in its heyday), but for me this IP connection happened to be a pay-by-the-minute dialup ISP, so the offline nature of fidonet helped me stay glued to the computer and actively participate in dozens of communities with just a few expensive online minutes per day. Later in highschool (I even managed to find a teenage crush my age from another city in some echo! we exchanged pics with uuencode in netmail =D) I ran my own dialup node just for fun on an old PII with NT4 in a cardboard box under my bed. It survived multiple hardware and geographical moves and was running over IP up to about 2012-ish, and was finally nuked from the nodelist in 2018. I still have all the configs in the backups somewhere and the active NCs contact, so technically could get it back up if really wanted to. Too bad there's nobody there to speak to.

Addition: turned out, nowadays you can just run the "normal" FTN stack (binkd, husky, golded) in a docker container and access it with a browser. "It's not dead, it's just smells like it". https://kuehlbox.wtf/projects,fidian - no affiliation.