Similarly, I think I got started because AOL added a "feature" of free web host space, and curious about such new features I explored using it. As much as Usenet laments that first part of "Eternal September" when AOL opened up a ton of such features to become a "real" ISP, they also launched a lot of test space for early website design for some of us. (At one point I think I had all 5 screen-names that AOL allowed per account just for website hosting. I was privileged in that no one else in the household ever needed to use AOL much, I suppose in hindsight.)

I remember moving stuff to GeoCities and Angelfire and weirder lost cousins like XOOM only when AOL started adding hidden fees for web space (I recall something like they started with a 10MB/screen-name free cap and then dropped to 1MB/screen-name cap), and then it was more important when the cost structure of AOL itself couldn't compete with other ISPs and it was time to move on from AOL dial-up to DSL.

It's a shame that "free web space" stopped being a competitive "feature" for ISPs. I like the tilde.town aesthetic of bringing back shared shell space. I sometimes wonder if there were a way to make something like that a "feature" that any kid "already has access to and should explore", but doing that at scale seems tough. Maybe more reason to see if we can do interesting things in decentralized web and decentralized web discovery mechanics as most people's home computers are already more capable than many of the very web servers ISPs used early in the web when free space was a competitive feature (they are just locked behind too many NAT layers and firewalls, for both good and bad reasons).

I haven't played with it, but I know that there's https://neocities.org/ which is a spiritual successor.