I think early on, there was no front page of the internet. It would have been your university's telnet or gopher server or something. But really there wasn't one. I don't think it was Usenet, certainly. With the early web, Yahoo might have been the closest thing. I don't think there could be anything like centralization or aggregation (I mean: a single place people went to by default) until the browser became ubiquitous, which in my personal history marks the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the middle phase of the internet. I agree that many people spent a lot of time on Usenet, but I think many more people couldn't be bothered.

I learned basic scripting by writing rooms and content for MUDs, I love them and sometimes wistfully think about starting one up.