Oh boy, not OP, but Orkut was the thing in my network those days (I was in high school), a majority of part was in "communities" which were sort of like subreddits and the ability to read your friends' scraps (essentially messages) was dope (and time consuming)
Orkut was a massive hit in my college from about 2002 (? I think), till facebook arrived in 2008. Everything was in communities, similar to facebook groups, & personal profile pages were great too. You could even see who visited your profile page, so people used to control themselves from visiting their crush's profile too often. Obviously no smartphones then, so most of the time it was on computers only.
Communities were for favorite quotes, singers, feelings, persons, subjects etc.
Outside of the US a number of social networks that aren’t Facebook found huge success in some countries at one time or another, especially in the mid to late 2000s before Facebook fully established its dominance, it’s not all that surprising.
It’s still the case in a handful of markets (China etc).