it felt suddenly expensive to be online again...
For me it brings back a time when the internet felt more personable. Everything these days is boring, Facebook profiles, Tiktoks and Instagrams all look the same. We need the personal days back where people put their heart and soul into building their geocities page. Where you never knew what you'd find next when you press the next link on that web ring.
Everyone was still too cautious to type their credit card in or something. There was nothing to monetize. So, yeah, every website was someone's small passion project, with handwritten HTML.
State of the art for discovery used to be browsing a (manually?) curated directory on Yahoo. Google appeared and was a mind-blowing sea change. That's probably the peak, Google's inception up until jackass SEO marketers appeared. During that window, search worked fantastically over content that was fun to read.