Created this account just to reply to this. I've been running an Enigma1/2 BBS consistently for a couple of years now @ tel.houseofbaud.com. It's node based, running in PM2, and the developer provides a way to Dockerize it if you want to run it that way.
By default, the database is SQLite3, but I believe it has support for external/custom backends as required.
One of the cooler features is that it provides a way of running BBS Doors via DOSEMU. The menu system is a little confusing at first glance, but like all things the more time you spend with it, the more workable it becomes.
Scalability is left as an exercise to the end user, but as long as you have a concurrent database, you're only bound by the same things as every other Node app!
as someone interested in BBS that has next the no experience with (and barely any knowledge of) any of this, would this be a good starting point to start exploring?
Probably. Getting it up and running, even on a virtual machine, would probably be a good experience.
Getting a domain and putting it online would be something else, but you should be able to self-host this fairly easily if all you want to do is poke around.
