This is an important distinction, because depending on the size of your town and how social you were, there was a good chance you might meet these people in real life. Imagine if everyone in this thread actually went out for a beer or played disc golf with each other every once in a while.
On the packet radio side it was even more fun because you could see all the packets flying through the air and you could 'eavesdrop' on other people's conversations. Which sounds worse than it is - on the CB it was already a given that conversations were public so everyone was already used to that. And it didn't require any wizardry, pretty much every program showed a running log of the packets received. We're talking 1200 baud so you could actually follow it. People would often send stuff by broadcast too (usually many times because of the high packet loss and the chance of people missing it).
In fact this really helped my early grasp of network tuning, messing with window and repeat timers to improve performance. Because it was all going in slow-motion you could really see the effects.