I can't give an exact year, but my memory from the mid 90s was that webrings were generally formed around themed content, like beanie baby webrings or coin collecting webrings, mostly run by individual fans/enthusiasts, and were used as a means for discovering others interested in the subject.
Ok. That's fair. That's basically the way I remember them too. I just see that more like a distributed "web directory" used for cross promotion than a social network, but I guess it kinda sits in between.
It was self-promotional but not in cynical or necessarily commercial way, kinda like social media before "influencer" became a job title.
