Fingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking).

Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.

We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!