I consider the old Internet to have faded away by the mid-2000s, but the Internet of the late 90s was marvelous.
We had the absolutely brilliant Geocities, which allowed anyone with an idea to create their own website. The modern world often looks back on these websites as poorly designed, but that was the charm of it. People were expressing themselves through colors, textured backgrounds, animated gifs, and “website under construction” buttons.
My first Geocities website was a small collection of paranormal stories and images that I found interesting.
Webrings were a huge part of how Geocities websites linked together by theme. I would spend hours just browsing Halloween prop making websites through their webrings.
Website owners could submit for and win awards, which were little graphics they could display. Granted, these were mostly just to generate backlinks for the award givers, but they were still fun.
Besides Geocities, old Internet websites just felt unique and experimental. They were rough around the edges. Things didn’t always work and that was ok. Before businesses really relied on their websites, there was a lot more room to have fun with them.
In the early days of Google, even the average person could get their website to rank for keywords with a little effort. I used to browse Usenet group for tips frequently.