If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.
Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.
Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.