Genuinely curious, how would you build it differently? Would you stick with atproto's indexing model and try to simplify it, or would you use another approach?
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.
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.
Ah right, of course. Fair enough. I think Dave Winer is trying some similar ideas, though I haven't looked at it beyond knowing he's trying to extend RSS to support these capabilities.
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.
For what it's worth, the W3C recommends ActivityPub (fediverse base protocol). Do you like that one or do you only like the HTML stack?