[Jean-Philipe]

From my experience, it used to be quite normal for a lot of my non-technical peers to have a personal webpage on the internet with frontpage express, wordpress or geocities. Nowadays, even a lot of businesses don't have a website, but instead an Instagram or Facebook entry. YMMV

The internet is still decentralized today.

[konart]

Idk, most people I know used services like wordpress.com (so not self hosted), livejournal (and its local alternatives) etc.

This if we are talking about second half of 00s. Before this? Most people barely have internet access at home. And things like BBS (for example) were for techies only with very few exceptions.

Maybe it was quite different in the US for example.

[Jean-Philipe]

Yeah sure wordpress.com or geocities are not self hosted - but you had much more control over your content. People would just link to other blogs they like or comment on their guestbook / comment page. People would host php-forums. In each friends circle (school or hobby groups) there was always at least one kid who would be tech enough to host some php app on a shared hosting, and people would actually use it. But just self-hosting was not really my point, it was the degree of control that used to be common. I'd argue even myspace was much better than what we have today.

[queenkjuul]

I don't think so, i was very young but my family didn't have Internet whatsoever until 2001 and didn't have broadband until 2005 (in the US). I certainly didn't know anyone self hosting anything (even my most tech savvy older relatives), but by 2005 we were all on Myspace.