Was a lot of it classic word of mouth, email, etc.?
I imagine something like that, but I’m wondering as I feel like there may be some useful pieces of knowledge that may be worth recalling as people gradually start to move back out of the more centralized sites/services.
As a youngster then, it was mostly word of mouth and random links.
Someone would have some cool site or game they’d tell everyone about. You’d see someone at the library on some site and you’d peek at the URL.
Sometimes those sites would link to other sites.
It felt endless even back then. And for all intents and purposes, it was, to the average user.