Hmm… I still have printed out some correspondence from prodigy bbs focused on SNES game genie codes for FF6, which is probably the earliest physical artifact / memory.

I also remember the very first two times I interacted with IRC, which on time #1, I picked a random nick from mechwarrior and talked to someone. Then, on time #2, i couldn’t remember and picked a new nick from mechwarrior, and person I talked to had no idea who I was and I didn’t remember the name either. That one really stuck “identity” into my consciousness.

Another strong memory would be my homemade, geocities webpage with a starfield background and midi/tracker music player loaded, “under construction” sign on page, and text about FF7’s sepiroth. lost to time, though.

Outside of that… phpbb and other random forums, irc culture especially for music creators with things like one-hour compos for tracker tunes as a way to write anything, shit or not. good stuff.

Also, early MMO games had really neat emergent behavior and it was fun to see how the social aspects played out. I think that’s … adjacent to web 1 stuff and MUDs. So, in Ragnarok Online, low-level acolyte classes had few ways to level but they could us their heal spells offensively against undead monsters. The best way to do this was against high-level undead things, and there was a place (glastheim churchyard) that had a safe location to rest and restore mana. Well, higher-leveled priests would electively go there and party up with folks purely because the higher-leveled priests had a spell to “increase mp regen” for party. effectively, they’d party a bunch of lower-leveled folks, sit in safe space, and repeatedly cast the spell when it ran out. that’s it.

later, the game added non-undead to the zone, as well as an mvp / boss spawn. kinda rude, tbh. but i loved all the social spaces folks would gather around to be safe and regen health/mana between leveling sprees. newer takes on MMOs miss that.