There were heaps of private BBSes in the 80s and 90, many of those were pirate sites but some were run by art groups for their members, churches and so on. So private digital spaces are not new by any means
Sure I'm not saying they're _new_. I was too young for the BBS era, but I visited plenty of private or semi-private forums in the 90s. I just mean that, in hindsight, I think most of us will view the Facebook-style concept of the "global village" as an unstable aberration of the 2000s rather than the primary way to socialize as many tech folks optimistically believed back then.
