I came online halfway through the 90's, I would play console games, single player share-ware stuff on the family PC, watch TV and draw a lot before then. I started on my own little grey Win95 PC with ROM's and playing in MSpaint with Sprites from stuff like Final Fantasy, DBZ and Secret of Mana. I was so close to just starting a sprite comic of my own!
I found myself watching streams of shows & movies on Shoutcast, downloading game & music torrents, making little HMTL profiles on various sites and also trying my hand at mini webmastering through flimsy .tk sites. Hanging out on online games and forums while talking to my friends on instant messengers.
I was also a very avid web comic reader. I would check my large list of links on a weekly basis and spend whole saturdays behind the family computer just reading next to playing games. I used to also have fun little things like LJ and VF where I would pour my dumb heart out.
That was a long time ago, me and the landscape have changed. The rise of profile sites with less & less user interactivity and input took over.
It made it easy to find and connect to people, I get it. I think we all had that annoying year where all the invites to parties went through Facebook and not checking yours made you feel like a hermit.
I grew nostalgic for a while about all the old stuff as I saw sites, users, media and art itself just disappear. I had kept myself busy with Tabletop, mobile phone modding and watching all my things on YT instead of their own sites like only a few short years ago.
Soon enough, even the sites we used became turbulent for the people on it just trying to share their work, portfolio and whatever else. Video sites crashing one after the other due to hosting costs, streaming sites losing to their competitors and an investor-friendly sanitation purge of the web. (I wrote this with pre-2020 in mind, things repeated alot)
While I see a benefit of having large hubs to interact with other people, I feel we all should have a little space of our own, too. There is so much worth in the self-expression, even if flawed.