Can you define when "the internet" starts for you? I'll go over my own anecdotal experience and what I can remember being the rough progression and milestones.

So, when I was growing up, we could dial into other computer systems with a basic, text-based bulletin board system and send and read messages. A bit later, Compuserve came along where we lived and there were various areas and activities. We didn't have HTTP yet, but you could connect with other people, check stocks, etc. I think there was some rudimentary shopping, but I might be mis-remembering. There may have been trolls around but I was rather young and don't remember much.

Somewhere in here, we get things like Archie, Veronica, etc. that could find different things on the pre-web internet. NNTP newsgroups came to be (you can think of these as sort of proto-forums, I guess, but that's not an exact thing). These were generally fairly unfiltered and could be wild. Trolls, of course, existed here and I think it's where we get the terms flaming and flame war (which no one seems to use anymore). You could find porn and such with a bunch of message each containing chunks of data you had to stitch together. Downloading a single picture and assembling it could take minutes to hours depending upon what you were working with (rural, slow dial-up in my case).

IRC also comes to be somewhere in here. You would connect to real-time chatrooms. I used this to communicate with coworkers up until ~2013 as we had a work IRC server.

Starting in the early (IIRC) 1990s, we had things like AOL, Prodigy, and other services that kinda built on the Compuserve premise (and indeed AOL would buy Compuserve). AOL would also at least popularize instant messages. Remember at this point, we had no phones to text on still. There were certainly trolls and lots of child predators (and cops trying to catch them, eventually). AOL eventually started adding access to the early web which is mostly how I got there, Universities and such had much better internet and other internal and external systems (when I got into Uni a bit before 2000 we still learnt Archie, Veronica, and the earliest search engines with Yahoo being the best at the time IIRC).

The early web was mostly people posting static pages for other people to load and look at. Amazon would get started as a bookstore in '95 (I think) and there were some other businesses, but a lot of people were a bit scared to try to buy anything online without seeing and handling the product first and over insecure connections. This would change rather rapidly. There were some early forums which could be pretty free-for-all but some were quite moderated. Pages would slowly get comments and guest books.

Commercial interests increased and increased, but we still got things like the iCQ messenger, Friendster, Myspace, etc. as well. Moderation and legal policies evolved. Fan sites were pretty awesome and, as forums evolved, many people could talk about their interests. Myspace blew up into a phenomenon and we start to get web 2.0. You probably grew up with this and as we transitioned into web3. Enshittification really took off in the early 2010s and began getting worse and worse.