Same. For me, usenet was "social media", long before social media was a thing. I remember in college hanging out in a newsgroup for people looking for a pen pal, and later exchanging letters with someone on the other side of the country whom I never met in person.
Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.