I agree with that. There were a number of anonymous remailers [0] where you could send emails to others, or make posts to Usenet[1]. The remainers would strip all the headers from your post and replace them with a specific number. Other users could then reply to you using that number without knowing your real email address or name. Likewise, you wouldn't know theirs. Coupled with PGP, anonymity was very high.

I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.

It was good not being tracked and traced.

[0] The most famous being anon.penet.fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet