Why, instead of creating an indexer that works with existing formats, did they choose to create one intentionally incompatible with 99.999% of web content? Because in practice it's not a web protocol, it's not a serious thing. It's just a whole bunch of bullshit for nerds to make blog posts about that serves as the back end of a Twitter clone. It is standards proliferation. It adds nothing and fragments existing efforts. Instead of contributing to the web ecosystem, it subtracts from it. It breaks the important rules of software development, to do one thing and do it well, to use existing solutions. Everything it does is duplicated, there's a new way to sign documents, a new way to host content, a new data format, a new exchange protocol, a new way to serve documents, a new way to send notifications, etc. It's not a tenable way of doing things. If every person looking to make a web indexer created an entire separate web ecosystem, that would not be sustainable. They're clearly not intending to replace the Web, so what are they doing? It's just a complicated way to store tweets.

And the silliest part is that, if I recall correctly, they don't even have decentralised network yet since only they can issue PLC DIDs.

I think it is generally bad to implement new features like this on the part of the indexer. It should just keep track of an existing web of documents rather than creating it's own format and walled garden.

One can imagine making it a little more featureful, for instance indexing OPML blogrolls which would allow you to see whom a person follows and https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry which would allow outgoing links to be categorised (like, reply, etc) so notifications filtered. With that, it would be possible to add a front-end site imitating one of the popular social media paradigms (Reddit-style or Twitter-style being the most obvious).

If there's one genuine design decision I would give for it beyond what is basically a cobbling together of existing interfaces, it would be to charge users per page uploaded. Likely very detrimental to growing the service, but I think one of the simplest ways to weed out spam and junk. A real problem with many web services is that the receiver of the message pays for it in terms of attention, where in other mediums the sender has to pay. Given that uploading crap is basically free, that's all you get. Increasing the cost of upload would weed out those endless AI summaries and lists of affiliate links.

The issue with ATProto is that it operates on too many layers. You can see lacking in what I have described here the concept of durable authorship, but this is a property of content not how the content is distributed. Perhaps someone will invent a standard way to sign HTML documents, in which case you could base user accounts on that instead of DNS. AT enforces this centrally but it does not need to. It is walling itself off from the common and decentralised software ecosystem of the web for no good reason.

- Email

- Semantic HTML

- Web indexing services

In this case, it's mostly indexing and a little of the other two if you want to add social features. I despite ATProto with all my soul for taking a problem with such a simple and standard solution and totally obscuring it behind hundreds of layers of JSON, faux federated services, and technical jargon, all in service of creating an inferior version of Twitter. I guess it wouldn't be as sexy to offer a web indexing service instead.

And beyond that, it's perfectly useless. A Wikipedia article restating the information on Odin's website is a net negative information wise. You've got duplicate content for no good reason. The point of Wikipedia is to take a topic about which much has been written, and distill that into a smaller and more information dense summary. A person who finds the Odin language on Wikipedia would always be better served looking at the website instead, and thus the article is actively harmful to their understanding of the topic.