There were definitely different cultures within the BBS world. I was on a fairly small-time but professionally run BBS that wasn't really part of the warez/hacker community. One thing that was different a lot of the time from Usenet was that, given you were dialing up from home at a time when telephone calls were expensive, if you were into BBSing, you tended to get a subscription to a local board, so it was fairly natural to form a local community around the main board.

I guess Usenet had some local forums but my Usenet experience was that it was mostly locationless. (The bigger BBSs like the one I was on had relay boards like Fidonet but there was definitely a local vibe on the main board.)

There also just wasn't a lot of overlap between BBSs in their heyday and the people who had access to the Internet from school or work.

OMG the Bitnet. 91 there were about a hundred machines from which people came into the relay (chat) and we thought we knew them all... Had to press Enter every once in a while on the IBM 3270 terminal to see if somebody wrote in the chat. If there was a sudden storm of answers you got really busy reading and answering...

/signon

That was before all those people started to shuffle into IRC even...

I also remember getting the "Datenschleuder" where you could read how to build your own 300baud acoustic coupler...