Many people believe the golden era ended in 1993 or early 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Bit too early for me unfortunately, I was 6/7 then! I was still having a lot of fun up until about 2005, before I went off to university. The past week I've been trawling the Internet Archive to try and find things I vaguely remember - it's remarkably hard. So much of that era is missing, though thankfully one of my own sites was indexed and I'm able to fan out a bit from there. Albeit mostly to French anime fansites, but I'll take it.

1993 Was where the internet was still niche that barely any content existed outside of chats.

Up to the social media era was a nice intersection between a good amount of content, good quality, and enough people to where you could legitimately find a community for almost any niche.