Not many people had their own website in the late 90s

Your post is pretty nonsensical anyway, but if anything more people had their own websites as a proportion of the web, with Geocities and Angelfire etc. This was before social media, so to have a presence on the web you had to have your own site, and people did.

This has come up as part of those requests to migrate accounts between instances. “I want a persona that stays with me for years”… Is that actually a good idea though!?