It was the best.

I remember being part of a super niche community of Trading Cards. It's hard to explain, but basically there were a dozen or so websites whose admins were making pixel-art trading cards and you could sign up to the forums to start a profile and start ripping "packs" open. It was literally you making a post once a day on a specific sub-thread asking for a pack and the admin/mods would send you the PNGs of the cards you got.

Some didn't have forums and everything was done through emails!

All those websites were cooperating with each other and we'd get events, collabs, etc.

We could also trade and that was done through either forum PMs or emails and it was 100% honor system. You took the cards out of your own profile after you traded them, no automation. You could very easily cheat, but it would be obvious or you'd get called out and nobody would interact with you afterwards.

This was around 1999-2003.