Yeah sure wordpress.com or geocities are not self hosted - but you had much more control over your content. People would just link to other blogs they like or comment on their guestbook / comment page. People would host php-forums. In each friends circle (school or hobby groups) there was always at least one kid who would be tech enough to host some php app on a shared hosting, and people would actually use it. But just self-hosting was not really my point, it was the degree of control that used to be common. I'd argue even myspace was much better than what we have today.