I agree. This is like Usenet, or further back the old Fidonet days where most people accessed through a small local hub, but you still had the nutty people who ran their own node.
Make it easy for people to participate casually, but also make sure that people can customize to their liking and exert full control over their own stuff if they wish to, without causing trouble to the rest of the network.
No, nodes were usually BBS systems. If you wanted to use same protocol, then you did run your own point usually. Of course there were a few sysops with their own nodes. But Point was the usual way of personally joining the network using official protocols. Of course most did use qwk and bluewave etc to get messages quickly without setting up systems without mandatory zone mail hour etc. Didn't you run your own point / node? ;)
Make it easy for people to participate casually, but also make sure that people can customize to their liking and exert full control over their own stuff if they wish to, without causing trouble to the rest of the network.