I think my favorite thing about this is fanfic archives were like THE thing in the late 90s. I'm pretty sure the slayer fanfiction archive dated to 97, there were several more, and there was this MASSIVE sliders fanfic site that was just a bunch of text files which I've forgotten how to access to see if it was archived, I think it was from 96.

Webrings started around 96, maybe like early 96. And personal website use promptly exploded. I'd mark the early 00s as the beginning of the end for blogging as I knew it, and the rise of lifestyle blogging. But fanfic archives, as straight up nice communal websites with decoration and stuff, were cutting edge. When fanfiction.net came along, people mirrored stuff there at first.