Was a lot of it classic word of mouth, email, etc.?
I imagine something like that, but I’m wondering as I feel like there may be some useful pieces of knowledge that may be worth recalling as people gradually start to move back out of the more centralized sites/services.
Earlier forms of SEO: I remember when Yahoo was a directory, not a search engine. In those days the categories they accepted you into mattered A LOT for discoverability.