@rose_alibi this is probably overlooked, yeah, though i do wonder about the scope of it. i uploaded my first website when i was 11 and was hosting a web forum for online friends when i was 15/16. but i was very much the outlier in having an online existence compared to my peers. i have often had the sense that the level of ambient online friendships and general *pervasiveness* of online social interactions for tweens and teens that is largely known today didn’t really take off until the mid-00s.

so i tend to think that running web forums and the like was the exception rather than the rule, at least into the early 00s. kids might put up static geocities and angelfire and tripod sites since they were easy. but it was much harder to get access to resources to let you run dynamic ones (though there were plenty of services that would host forums/guestbooks/etc. on your behalf!)

after all, domain names still cost $99 a year as late as 1999!