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.
For me it was word of mouth. I found out about Slashdot, fark, Google, and boingboing from friends.
I remember hearing about Google for the first time… how does it work? What do you mean there are no categories? How do you find something? Oh, it uses a link-based system of ranking? So if I search for puppies, it won’t just look for sites with the word “puppies,” but also at the sites that they link to and from? Oooh if a site mentions puppies, and a lot of other sites that mention puppies also link to it, then it is probably an important site when it comes to puppies?
But how did they make it work? They downloaded a complete copy of the internet? That must have taken a googol of bytes!
It made so much sense. And it was mind-blowing at the same time.