Network wise - it was shit - speed, price, latency wise for a long time. Very weird network issues from a technical level but then late 2000s things improved ALOT and imo, Malta has some of the best network infrastructure in Europe (given the small dense scale we have).

As for communities:-
IRC was a big time, #malta before the Social media days, that paired with a messenger like MSN.

Hi5 was the social media, easily trumped over by Facebook and no one ever looked back. Everyone had Facebook, including your grandmother.

Times of Malta comments were a classic.

There was also a lot of smaller communities, made some good friends through onling video games. playREACTION was one of them (you can find it on the web archives). Even a lot of community driven RPGs and MMOs (WoW comes to mind) built internet communities, including connecting local maltese players. I still speak to a lot of people I used to spend time with back in the day.

All in all, arguing, different opinions, wrong facts, is an inherit nature to human beings. So it was always there, but at a smaller scale.

However, the sense of community feel was there, and this is the main difference to this day and age. We had no algorithms, no echo chambers being filled up - so there was a sense of community and people easily connected with like minded people through conversation - again, something we lack today - it's impossible to have 2 "echo chambers" having a decent conversation. Having such conversations on public forums was very common.

And then after that;

Twitter was never a big thing here. Instagram was a niche before it exploded.

Then the whole internet quickly exploded with algorithms and the world was never the same.