Let's say Usenet.

When I gained access at university, search engines hadn't really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn't know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)

However, the university also provided Usenet access.

Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.