@molly0xfff I have been too online since I was a teenager in the 90s. Made Geocities pages, lived on IRC and ICQ, used newsgroups, etc.
I don’t really miss it. It’s always been balkanized (various chats, various phpbbs, slashdot, digg, something awful). The same arguments around moderation.
The tech was just awful. Browsers had splash screens they loaded so slowly. JPEGs were progressively loaded. Flash and Java abounded. Security was nonexistent.