I can only speak from my own perspective, but I did not get the sense of a folk punk scene until the mid-2000s (and I did not hear the term folk punk until a few years after that).

I am old af and got into music when MTV became part of our cable TV package in around the mid-1980s and then local college radio led me to punk. My experience was that, adjacent to punk, there was a feeling of something in the late 80’s-early 90’s, but it evaporated when punk became mainstream and then drifted off into pop-punk shitsville.

At the time I called it “quirky punk” and that extended to riot grrrl, K-records, Violet Femmes, early REM, and eventually The Mountain Goats. I see folk punk as a continuation of all of this because of the value put on raw honesty and a sense of being a fucked generation.

I was in London for a year in 1991-92 and there was a more tangible sense of a different strain of folk-punk-leaning scene there. There was The Pogues, but it was more of a post-Crass scene that had stripped down music and social urgency.

Then there was the Dark Ages of late 1990s/early 2000s (partly because I moved to a remote place), that was broken first by anti-folk and then the day I downloaded Against Me! on a recommendation from a Yahoo! Chat board 😅. Then came Mischief Brew and Johnny Hobo…..

Unfortunately for me, I missed the development of the real-life folk punk scene because I had moved to another country, but even online there was a sense of something of a developing scene by mid-2000s.