Yes, the world (and the net) seemed much smaller back then. My first real taste of multiplayer like that (not counting LAN parties) was playing 4 player doom over modem... it required some expensive hardware and software back in the day. I even paid long distance to do it. The BBS running it had to have a special dongle and then the APCiDoom software. Man that was cool.

https://kangaroopunch.com/view/ShowSoftware?id=1

I used Kali too, for Descent and other games. The chat rooms were true communities, probably one of the first times as a kid that I connected with other like-minded people (aka nerds).

I used to work with Jay. He had a consulting gig at my job "for the insurance." Intense dude.

There was also Kahn, which was a similar competitor.

I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.

The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.

I used Kali as well. Mostly for Warcraft 2. This must have been before Battle.net.