

You are saying this as if you were flexing your old age to me, while so am I.
No. You can’t see their face.
Chat rooms and web forums were in some sense safe spaces. There would be intrigue, but somewhat limited by what concerns a specific forum, or even a specific part of it, or a specific chat. Even conflicts in one place between two people would often not extend to some other place.
And also, believe it or not, people frequenting same spaces would sometimes have offline meetings and know each other personally. Especially moderators and such.
But I agree that what you mentioned was like halfway there from today’s online communication which sometimes seems just useless.


You can have controlled registration and authorized relays with Nostr too.
But the part where deploying Matrix is simple is, I suppose, the main reason.