On the other hand, when high speed connections separate from the phone line became a thing and vBulletin and phpBB and what not proliferated and there were a whole lot of still small but at least somewhat widely used and representative places to socialize online without corporate ad giants tracking your every move, for a few shining years, that was pretty nice. Maybe 1999 to 2005 or so. It was a pretty weird moment we'll never get again when I could meet multiple primetime television actresses on Internet dating sites, when any earlier, they wouldn't have been online at all, and any later, they'd have professional social media managers and would get inundated with so much spam they couldn't sift through it even if they wanted to.
For a very, very brief time, the Internet was reasonably widespread and used but also still kind of authentic and not completely poisoned by fully-automated crime and ad companies.
Even the broadband era was great, too. For me, it was the mid-2000s when everything really starting going off the rails (Facebook + iPhone, mostly).
I miss the chronological discussion, instead of the echochamber Reddit's voting system encourages/enforces.
Nowadays all we have (even here...) is the Slashdot discussion style that almost obligatory starts with a link to an external source, and hierarchical comments that segregates the discussion.
In Usenet you had threads as in Slashdot/Reddit, but on scoring you were on your own tastes.
There were big boards like Something Awful, which did have enough users to become non-distinct. But that site was intentionally stupid and the context-free discussion was part of the joke.
Now, all online chat is context free, and we’re all shallow and stupid everywhere.
It wasn't a phpbb thing, it's a size thing. It was basically every message board style format for all time before that too. Including any usenet group that was under a certain size, which was most of them.
Computing was expensive. Communicating with a computer was even more expensive.
I was a kid with a BBS back then. I had parents who were very, very tolerant of an enormous phone bill, until that one time when I discovered the free-to-use-but-long-distance dial-up Internet service that was then known as cyberspace.org.
Shit changed a lot in my world when that four-digit phone bill showed up, and it stayed changed for quite a long time afterward.
The pre-WWW Internet did have some neat stuff going on, but meh. As much as I like to lament on the downfall of things like Usenet, I think we're in a much better spot for communicating and learning using these machines and networks than we were ~30 years ago.
(I do wish things were more local today, like BBSs usually were, but...)
However, you would probably be bored after an hour or two with the limitations on everything.