Let me chime in and confirm your suspicions... I get you! 😃
I will have to go even one step further into the past, in pre-Internet times, when you would connect over a modem to the BBS and discuss on public forums... After that, it was the Internet era and phpBB, and it was exactly as you described... You would join the discussion with strangers and become part of the community...
Also, when MySpace, FB, and the rest came, I was still on phpBB, and somehow, I skipped most of the socials that came after (Pinterest, IG, etc.. Interestingly, HIVE got me! Maybe because it was a similar "logic" to the one before... Strangers>building community>offline meetups... Or is it an "old-tech-type" social network that sticks with us "oldies"? 😂
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BBSs are actually a little before my time, but I remember that same basic feeling once I got into forums. You'd find some random corner of the Internet, start talking to people you'd never met, and before long you actually knew these people. Then you'd end up meeting some of them in real life, which still seems kind of amazing when you think about it.
And I think you're onto something with Hive. I skipped a lot of the social networks that came after the forum era too, but Hive immediately felt familiar to me for pretty much the same reason. It still feels like a place where people are actually there, rather than just being an audience for whatever the algorithm decided to put in front of them.
Maybe we're just old. 😂