I think my favorite way of describing the 90's internet(I was alive but not there for the 80's version) is that it was unfinished. Things were slow. Things broke a lot. Your computer crashed a lot. You didn't have the space to download a lot of stuff(a lot of people turned to printing out web pages). The number of venues was small enough that they could be listed(I had a 1992-era book that acted like a phone directory of all the interesting things there were to do). But there was a promise of possibility there. Once in a while, things did work. A site did what you wanted it to, seamlessly. You could go on Usenet or IRC or a MUD, and just talk to people. They were roughly as terrible as people today, but with a higher average level of income and education. You could occasionally talk to someone from a foreign country, too. Because the scale and sophistication of everything was small, there were many unlocked doors - limited or no protections. You could reasonably expect to moderate an online community on your own, and not drown in spambots, brigading, or DDOS attacks.

But the barriers to entry were high, as well. A state-of-the-art build consistently ran in the $2000 range - you could go cheaper but it often meant being several years in the past at a moment when Moore's Law was steamrolling every assumption in 18 month cycles, and software that kept pace with more and more features. Games in particular heavily targeted the enthusiasts. Many people got into PCs upon experiencing Doom for the first time. And running a server - well, most people were on dial-up lines, and in the early part of the decade, shell accounts, not the PPP connections that gave you full TCP/IP connectivity. If you ran a server, it was most likely part of a school or business connection. And then you had to maintain all of it yourself. The onset of free hosting - first with Geocities style static HTML, and then webpage builders and even PHP scripting, was a kind of early example of Internet commercialization. It allowed lots of folks to make their own web site for the first time, which they promptly filled up with "about me: i am 13 years old and have two dogs. sorry ill finish this later"

There were no real expectations around early Web content, after all. It was whatever you thought you needed to put there, and a consumer-branding mindset hadn't sunk in yet among Web surfers. You explored Web sites because there were no places with upvotes and newsfeeds, just pages you bookmarked and checked regularly in hopes of an update. If you wanted the drip feed of news, mailing lists and Usenet worked better. But gradually publishing and aggregation came into play on the Web, with both traditional news players and the likes of Slashdot, and web forums took up the baton from Usenet of allowing you to engage in topical discussion, except that over time all web forums turned into meta-communities defined by their off-topic discussion.

Then as now, the single most useful thing you could do in most circumstances was to send someone an email.