@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io This may just be my own personal journey, but I feel like the early-mid aughts were a special time with blogs, blog-rings, RSS, and aggregators. I remember building a proto-social-media site where local blogs were aggregated into a forum for discussion. A friend and I did a weekly podcast about underground rock bands in Shanghai. Pre smartphone photo blogs were amazing. Non-commercial sites like shanghaiist (gothamist franchise) and metafilter could survive on adword revenue. Google search still worked.

My memory of the "personal web" at that time is that it felt like it was a linear progression from BBSes, gopher, Usenet, and IRC. More graphical and more widely accessible, but with a lot of the same community spirit.