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I wonder if atmospheric websites (websites were most or all of their content is natively stored on the AT protocol) would alleviate this because there are so many places to get the content that aren’t just the website

it's better than that, by design atproto alleviates the need to crawl entirely by providing incremental updates as a primitive (relays) this is actually what got me on here, I think it may be the only way to save the web

going by vibes mostly bc i am not really technically competent at ATProto, i have nevertheless fully committed to the idea that ATProto is to the 2020s what HTTP was to the 1990s

It's more like a modern RSS IMHO? It's RSS but instead of syndicating an XML document you syndicate a collection of JSON documents. Relays full the role of PuSH/WebSub. Bluesky is Google reader.

(I think many people struggle to understand atproto because start from the misconception that atproto is a social networking protocol. But atproto does not understand follows or likes or posts. It's a publishing and syndication protocol designed to make it easy to build social things on top of it.)

yeah, I see the parallels to RSS on technical terms but I would say that atproto's potential impact is closer in scope to the web itself RSS was poisoned by a very unix-like "worse is better" mentality, but thankfully atproto is a hard turn in the opposite direction

What makes you think RSS was poisoned by "worse is better"? Do you mean the move away from RDF? Because if so... RDF was never going to happen and y'all need to get over it.

no not at all, I just mean that there is an enormous difference in complexity between rss and atproto and all of it is essential, which is why atproto can displace closed socials where rss succumbed to them

rss could never grow into such a thing because its simplicity is attractive to the sort of people who say things like "we don't need chat apps we have IRC" and then lose repeatedly just search any atproto hn thread for "too complicated" and you'll find them

As with all old technologies, that is true now (See people talking about how Wayland is too complex and modern and we should RETVRN to X—which is extra funny because Wayland is dead simple and X is ridiculously complicated)...

...but when RSS was still a lot more relevant people were trying to push it in that direction and/or build additonal protocols to allow for richer cross-social-network interop. The first two iterations on the fediverse were built on RSS for example.

See also: Salmon, WebSub/PuSH, etc.

(and then eventually activitypub happened. Unfortunately activitypub was cursed by the tripe-headed demon of compromise and needed to appease the indieweb simplicity maximalists, the RDF people, and the people who wanted an actually good protocol.)

OpenID also came out of this period, where it solved cross-site identity and kind of solved private data (In that you can go to the user's website and view their private posts their by logging in with your OpenID. Not great, but it ain't nothing!)

I appreciate the historical context to be clear I wasn't making a technical point so much as a social one, I think attracting the "actually good protocol" people and repelling the simplicity maxis is a legitimate success criterion which atproto has passed

AP clearly failed here (which is why I was never interested in it) and I don't know much about nostr but I get the strong impression they have failed this one as well despite engaging in plenty of cryptographic shenanigans

nostr definitely failed here but frankly nostr has much worse problems. There are things I'd consider using AP for, and some cool people who hang out on the fediverse. I'd never for a million users use nostr for anything.