My guess as to why your text-only BBS is more popular is because it more realistically lines up with what people expect when they try to get into retrocomputing, it's something people can do on modern computers (WIndows 8.1U1 doesn't have telnet built in, but Windows 7 does, and of course there's PuTTY, and OS X has telnet built in) and it's reminiscent of something more people had, and that was cheaper than a Mac even up through the 1990s.
It's also easier for most people who want to experience something nostalgic, but who don't specifically care about any given type of old computer, just to telnet to something from Terminal.app than to set up a Basilisk II machine.
It's charming and quaint, and in the 1980s while there were still more Apple II and COmmodore 64 users than Mac users it made sense that Mac users would access those types of online services. However "when in Rome" as they say and my personal interests for communications on old Macs are definitely with the graphical applications, or with graphical applications that accessed normal Internet services such as FTP, IRC and e-mail, which provided communication tools that leveraged the Mac as a system.
As far as my non-Mac systems go, VMS notes all the way.
Tangentially: I've for a while wished I could find a menu driven shell for UNIX systems. One of the first remote systems I ever accessed was the Solaris server at my university and it had this menu driven system through which you could use a variety of normal UNIX tools in a way that made it feel a lot more unified than it really was.
It's also easier for most people who want to experience something nostalgic, but who don't specifically care about any given type of old computer, just to telnet to something from Terminal.app than to set up a Basilisk II machine.
It's charming and quaint, and in the 1980s while there were still more Apple II and COmmodore 64 users than Mac users it made sense that Mac users would access those types of online services. However "when in Rome" as they say and my personal interests for communications on old Macs are definitely with the graphical applications, or with graphical applications that accessed normal Internet services such as FTP, IRC and e-mail, which provided communication tools that leveraged the Mac as a system.
As far as my non-Mac systems go, VMS notes all the way.
Tangentially: I've for a while wished I could find a menu driven shell for UNIX systems. One of the first remote systems I ever accessed was the Solaris server at my university and it had this menu driven system through which you could use a variety of normal UNIX tools in a way that made it feel a lot more unified than it really was.