The public blogosphere died because of Google, simple as. Once search stopped prioritizing blogs over bloated, SEO-optimized slop, traffic to blogs died and discoverability was limited to you spamming your posts everywhere.
People forget how "tightened up" the web is nowadays, or many just aren't old enough to remember. It wasn't 10 years ago that Fox News would archive full, uncensored ISIS videos on their website - which is kind of insane, when you think about it.
Average age of first phone ownership is really young these days, which is arguably the #1 factor in everything online becoming a closed system for sheep.
On the other hand, no parents want their 11-year-old wandering into videos of hostages being burned alive. Or getting solicited for photos etc. So the internet is kind of dying for the sake of real life.
You can always search old blogspots. https://www.searchblogspot.com
My normal blogs only got traffic from comments made on other blogs. Yahoo indexed them entirely, google picked up nothing.
If I put adsense on it the crawler visited every day but only to find context for the ads.
Somehow Google found WordPress blogs highly attractive, probably because of heuristics that they put in…. Cause web crawling and web search are all about heuristics. On some level tracking changes to a WordPress is a hot mess because it has numerous reverse chronologically sorted pages that all update when you add a blog post which makes more work for the crawler but also makes the site look more dynamic than it really is.
The usual reason I hear “blogging is dead” is that Google isn’t sending traffic, it could be Google doesn’t have heuristics to support modern blogging platforms (say Hugo) that it did. Maybe Jamstack = Invisibility.
Shutting down technorati wasn't an accident. They made blogging uninteresting on purpose.