Ultimately a federated network may be the best option, with cooperatives that curate themselves. Like a suped up version of the web portals of yore.

These strategies will largely still technically work, but I fear that people have generally lost their self sufficiency and will tolerate the further enshittification of the dominant services out of habit, ignorance, and/or lack of motivation.

And a lot of sites had pages dedicated just to links to other sites the webmaster liked, something you still see on webcomic sites. If you liked one site's content you'd find stuff the creator liked and jump across a dozen sites of cool shit before Mom needed to use the phone and kicked you offline.

A lot of your time you'd find stuff though sharing links between users in chat rooms, forums, email lists, or telling your buddy to check out this cool site you found when you were visiting his house. Organic word of mouth. Maybe if you knew what SEO was you'd get boosted in Yahoo search rankings.

In the somewhat old days of the internet when almost everything was independent you'd get discovered a few ways. Early social/sharing sites are the most familiar to us today, although they actually did what users expected to a greater degree back then.