Plenty of people use Discord these days, which is literally just the modern chat room. But this concept has existed essentially since the start of the internet. And even before.
There was a time in High School, where my friend and I figured out how to directly call each other over the computer to chat online. I mean, we could have just called each other, especially since we were doing it over dial up modems, but it was new and techy and super cool!
We also used a few BBS systems that had a chat feature. I used to use one with the username “Bevis” because I screwed up spelling “Beavis”.
The next big one for me was IRC or Internet Relay Chat. I had my own channel (anyone could make channels), and it was mostly filled with folks from AGFF (alt.games.final-fantasy). We even had a dumb little bot, if you said “X is Y” it would catch that and remeber, then repeat it if you said “X” again. We used it for so many dumb jokes.
Then there is Discord, the modern chat everyone uses.
Chat is great. I love that it can be both real time conversations but also asynchronous. I can @ or T someone and they can respond hours later.
Even chatting in games can be this way too. You can just randomly talk with strangers in public chats usually. Though they have a fancy game wrapper, they are still just fancy chat rooms.
