I actually didn't get to experience the pre-web internet fully myself. Some people I knew used apps like Gopher, a predecessor of HTTP which allows you to create hierarchical shared document structures on the Internet. Bulletin boards had existed since the 1980s but I never used them. But I can say that the web was a much, much smaller in the early days. People used to share link lists on their homepages. The earliest social media I took part in was Usenet news, which is not built on the web at all, and of course, IRC.
This is absolutely a new information to me and many others! Out of curiosity googled Usenet news and went through this Wikipedia article- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
I actually didn't get to experience the pre-web internet fully myself. Some people I knew used apps like Gopher, a predecessor of HTTP which allows you to create hierarchical shared document structures on the Internet. Bulletin boards had existed since the 1980s but I never used them. But I can say that the web was a much, much smaller in the early days. People used to share link lists on their homepages. The earliest social media I took part in was Usenet news, which is not built on the web at all, and of course, IRC.
This is absolutely a new information to me and many others! Out of curiosity googled Usenet news and went through this Wikipedia article- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
It still exists but the largest social media giants have a dominant share of the market.