> but when search engines never point you to it

So? This internet existed LONG before modern search engines. We found each other, and still do. How? Links, that's how. One breadcrumb leading to the next.

Plus, it's not as if search engines are the great windows to the interwebs they once were, and that situation isn't improving:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google...

https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-wors...

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-c...

> social sites don't allow links to it

Same question as with the point about search engines, only with an even bigger "So?". So called "social" sites are not good entrypoints into the web as it is, and have every incentive not to be. They are ad-businesses, and their revenue depends on keeping users in their ecosystem, not guiding them somewhere else.

> even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.),

Excuse me?

Almost every major browsers allows using RSS feeds. They all have bookmarking functionality, usually tag- and searchable. And I am pretty sure, they all know what an `<a>`nchor is ;-)

As for uploading and editing: We have been doing this via webmasks for well over a decade, this is a solved problem. And it's not like I need the editing mask my self hosted blog-software offers to edit a page that is essentially a markdown document.

> Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad.

Compared to what, the retention in the "closed" web? Where everything gets flushed out of the recommendation feed as soon as it isn't making the ad-companies enough money any more? Oh, sure, the content may still be there somewhere, but who knows, since the searchability of the whole thing sucks.

In contrast, some resources of the "open" web I have in my bookmarks, rival the age of some of the "closed" web companies, and are still up and running. That's because it doesn't really take much to run a small website based on simple and relieable technology.

And even if they do go belly-up at some point, there is a good chance that their simple and relieable structure has been picked up and archived with all relevant information by any of the crawl-and-archive projects around. In contrast, please show me how I can reliably cite information from some random social media feed several years later.

> It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either.

On the contrary. In recent years, with the ever declining quality of search results, the ever increasing amount of low-quality machine-generated bloat on the web, and the toxicity and tribalism on "social" media, there has been a veritable resurgence of the simple, open, organic web. I see alot of people making new small community sites and interesting projects. And the glue holding all of these together making it discoverable, aka. blogs is in better shape than ever.

As I said before, the amount of clicks doesn't indicate health, and the attention of the masses don't really matter to resources that don't have to justify their existence by generating as much ad-revenue as possible.