maybe you were on the more funded side of history in this. As for me, Digg is way after LAMP got solidly plonked into "what I need for a dynamic website on cheap".
Essentially, start at 2000-2001 and more and more people going into running websites for all kinds of reasons (forums, blogs, webshops, etc. often hosted on low end offerings)
>>p_l+(OP)
I didn't enter the workforce until 2004, so yeah missed some of the early early days of PHP/MySQL. I used it for government work, was definitely not well funded haha! But I suspect digg started with MySQL b/c of similar reasons as anyone else, then helped amplify the cycle.