[AndrewKemendo]

This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no standardization ... <img> <br> <br> <img> ...

placed images.

If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.

[ballenf]

That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is required to use Instagram.

And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.

[ethbro]

The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.

Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.

But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.

The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).