I've observed that Unix itself was a social networking platform. Your Unix account was your identity across many services: email, finger, USENET, talk, etc. And it was distributed. And didn't rely on cruft like ActivityPub.
Totally! ident alongside IRC too. So many reinvented wheels. (Side note- I'm a little sad that https is the only protocol used for everything anymore).
Exactly - the finger protocol with .plan/.project files was essentially a proto-social network where users could publish status updates on Unix systems, and org-social follows that same decentralized, text-file-based philosophy but with modern tooling.