It wasn't commodified nearly to the extent it is now, so a large portion of it existed merely because of people's passion. There were no super sites of information like reddit, so people would create their own websites and forums dedicated to one subject. Forums still had their arguments, but it wasn't nearly as vitriolic as social media is now. Search really, really sucked until Google came along. Slow as balls.

Everything was somewhere in between https://slashdot.org/, https://ytmnd.com/, and 4chan.

The nostalgia is entirely wasted on anyone who lived through 90s internet. It was cool because I was 12 and getting to drink from the information fire hose was a daily adventure. But it had all the same garbage politics, slop content, and horndog users of the modern internet.

The biggest difference between then and now is that Then Internet was considered a kind of counterculture (which meant 90s Reichwing Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh screeching like a stuck pig every time he heard about a new fad or meme he didn't like) while Now Internet has your Rush Limbaugh tier content and your Chinese Rednote apps bumping into one another in the same oversized wave pool.

It's not the early internet, but a lot of websites in the 00s (when I started using it) let you customize your profile. We all had horrible CSS and an autoplay song that only we liked on our Myspace profiles and it was great. Flash was both a buggy mess that could introduce viruses to your computer and an amazing outlet for creativity that I don't think has been replaced. It was a lot less centralized and you were only being tracked across the whole internet by the NSA and not every internet company too.

Edit: I should say that I lose a bit of nostalgia every time I see forum posts from that era though, the casual bigotry was everywhere and so obnoxious

Look up "indie web" and just start clicking links until you see URLs you've never heard of before.

Congrats, you're surfing the web. Let us know if you find anything cool.

You never had to create an account to view anything in the website.

Mindless scrolling was not a thing because links were mostly nested.

It was also extremely easy to chat with perverts on mIRC, the Yahoo chat thing etc. Speaking of chats, all of your chat logs were stored locally on your PC as text files rather than on a cloud so you could delete them if you wanted.

You know how lemmy or xyz social media is people posting their thoughts directly so you kinda get a look into their brains? And maybe there's a pic or vid or some other link to accompany it to support the topic of their post. Imagine that but it's entire websites basically built from the ground up with what one lone person believed was aesthetically appropriate to communicate their ideas or passions.

And nothing was centralized so there might've been a hundred time cube variations but no one ever found them because they weren't linked on anyone's webrings. It was all beautiful terrible madness.