114. Where to begin.
In the early days of the mainstream internet, before 1995 or so, IRC was the backbone of internet communication.
Then Yahoo said wait a minute, we can commercialise this, lets make our own chat program. Our own messenger. Now, at the time, Yahoo was booming and absorbing technologies left, right and centre. It was a search engine, a news service, a homepage, and was expanding rapidly across the burgeoning net. Creating its own chat network was a sensible choice.
We - friends in the final year of high school, just entering the world - discovered the chat rooms from the homepage, and when we werent playing LAN based multiplayer games (Duke Nukem 3D, Warcraft 2, Rainbow Six), we'd browse the net in a friends little LAN room. We discovered chat.
Now, let me preface this with the fact that this was before catfishing was a recognized thing. This was before the internet had verification, safety rails, common sense, or oversight. This was before you suspected the girl you were talking to wasnt some 40 year old stoner dude in his mom's basement. This was before video, before voice chat, it was just text. Lots of text.
For some of us, it was was a way to be the people we wanted to be. To be amongst friends that didnt stab you in the back or leave you out of everything, to be amongst people that understood you, that you could laugh with, make fun of, celebrate together, and yep, in some cases even get intimate with.
One night, a bunch of us decided to meet up. Four or five of us already knew each other, and we were just as chaotic, unfiltered and funny offline as we were online, but we wanted to meet the other people that we shared so many hours with. It was amazing. Amazingly stupid in a "no way in hell I'd meet strangers now kind of way.