Was a lot of it classic word of mouth, email, etc.?
I imagine something like that, but I’m wondering as I feel like there may be some useful pieces of knowledge that may be worth recalling as people gradually start to move back out of the more centralized sites/services.
One other person said it but I can provide a bit more context: web rings were the life blood of fan communities that weren’t on Usenet or irc. Many people would make their own website (yes, geocities and much later, angelfire … there were others but I don’t recall) and petition to link up to the webring.
Being on group email lists was a big thing too. Listserv was one but there were a bunch of others at the time. The group emails were like forums a little bit.
At least in the corners of the Internet I hung out there were a few sites that got “big” and they would often have pages that would maintain links to other sites as well as being part (or the originator) of the webring. Sometimes on the community site you could be kind of a member and get a blurb, or just your name, which would link to your email or person website (or both}.
The larger and more polished community sites really did kind of end up as these social hubs and an early form of social media.
You still used search engines to dick around but they really sucked pre-seo but they were sometimes their own community and link hubs in their own right (Yahoo).
You could also just browse larger sites manually. Exploration was part of the experience and stumbling on weird stuff randomly was one of the best things about late 90s, early 00"s internet.