In my experience social networking began with Friendster, where artifacts of your network were key to they experience. But this was preceded by web-based discussion and link sharing sites like kuro5hin and metafilter, where your profile and the viewable history of your comments and interactions with other users represented you to others.

There are many elements from that era that still exist in a weird way. The core limitation of connecting to a BBS was that it was a normal phone call and would tie up your phone line. And before cell phones, calling outside your area code was expensive! Likely $1 a minute in the 80s.

So BBS communities tended to be local and quasi-anonymous, and often turned into real life meetups. You would log on, check your messages, your door games and some forums then leave. Door games were structured much like phone games now with limited moves per day, but done for phone line reasons instead of gamification/rev generation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

At home you would use a Mac/PC/etc as a terminal, connected via telephone line to some host like Compuserve ou your workplace computer. This prevented use of the landline for voice communication, a source of some jokes.

At work your terminal/workstation would be connected 24x7 via wired ethernet, or some other LAN but ethernet became dominant in the 1980s, at first with coax cable.

I'd be happy to old fart at ya from my memories of BBS times to slashdot, email me or start a Discord perhaps.