Yes, sort of! When I was a little kid, before our family had access to the internet, I was dialing into BBS (Bulletin Board System) servers that random people self-hosted around the world. Some were sort of secret and grew from word of mouth. Many of them were small communities, not too different from a lemmy instance, except it was all text-based. There was something so addicting and novel to suddenly be able to chat and contact random people all over the world.

Then when we did get the internet I would stay up finding all kinds of random homemade websites and web communities. I learned to code and built my own websites. verything was much more decentralized back then and it really did make the internet more interesting and full of unknown gems. People would put each other's website links on their websites, which formed endless paths to discover new places. For a while, the internet really was just random individuals with very little corporate/commercial content.