In the late 90s Oz universities generally gave their students email via Pine plus a 10mb web folder as standard. Many STEM students made random websites about their hobbies or poetry or whatever. It was like a proto Geocities.
And once you did that, your content was on the "World Wide Web", not just some "Gopher server". The WWW name made the venue sound more intriguing.
I was pretty jealous of that over here in NZ.
Oh god, pine - I completely forgot about that. Thank you for bringing it up!