Dial up, mostly. Cable showed up pretty quick. Slower. More open. More egalitarian. Not SEO’d. Simpler. Anyone could make a webpage and find a free place to host it or spend just a few dollars a month for a better site host. Lots of phpbb forums or similar, basically Reddit except each sub is its own independent forum with its own, independent mods. Bots weren’t a concern. Trolls weren’t really formalized, though they certainly existed. Assholes gotta be assholes. Ads were barely a thing. The gnashing of teeth as banner ads first started to make inroads was real. There were lots of search engines.

It was a bit more dangerous though. You could relatively easily download or open a virus, email spam with malware was definitely a thing and not filtered by ISPs. You could find some really dark corners and see some pretty awful things, ogrish was the precursor to live leak. Newsgroups were popular and a great place to find warez (nobody calls it warez anymore).

There were a lot of people that made free software to fill in the gaps where big software needed help. Everything from photoshop filters to windows tweak tools to things like Gimp got some of their starts early on as dedicated programmers did it because they could. Plenty of niche hobby forums, help forums, weird shit, and almost none of it was monetized. There was no real social media. We just had newsgroups, AIM, MIRC, ICQ and the like.

It was like MTV when they actually just played music and didn’t start all the tv show BS.

I do miss that internet. I think it was easier to actually connect with people, content wasn’t shoved in your face, ads weren’t shoved in your face, you weren’t constantly tracked. You weren’t monetized. You were part of the internet, not the object to have money extracted from.