I don’t think I ever met lilo offline, but I know that we participated in spirited discussions on #joiito, and I know that the freenode IRC net that he oversaw made, and continues to make, a great contribution to online communications.
Sometimes people say that connections made online are less real than offline interactions. I dare say that they are flat-out wrong. In time, perhaps pretty soon, we’ll have adjusted to the online dimension of human interaction, and the replacement panic reaction “that’s not a real friendship” or “you mean, he’s an online friend” will seem peculiar. That’ll be a day Rob helped prepare us for.