I lived in a small town in Nevada in the early 90s, and I ran one of the local BBSs. Every six months or so, we would have an IRL party and meet other BBS sysops and the users. It was really fun to finally be able to put faces with usernames.
BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!
It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.
I think one of the key aspects of the dialup BBS days was that long-distance connections were (sometimes very) expensive, and so BBS systems tended to be populated by locals. There were some networked BBS systems, though (FidoNet and WWIV spring to mind).
I played around with FidoNet back in the late 1980s/early 90s, when Usenet was not available to me, and FidoNet's Usenet-like echomail system had some very active groups. But even with FidoNet, there was very much a local-to-regional focus. Networks were organized geographically, and Net 115 (Chicago area) had some social gatherings. But FidoNet collapsed pretty quickly once the internet came to the public.
BBSs kind of served as a filtering device for finding other people like you. In a small town, it was easy to feel isolated and lonely for being a nerd, but then you find this community of other nerds!
It was great and I don't know the equivalent nowadays.