Article: There are no Instances in atproto

Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly.

A very useful article by Dan that we can now refer to.

Final para:

Separating hosting and apps fixes broken incentives in closed and in federated social. Coupling hosting and apps was the original sin, and the fix is simple.

Keep our stuff outside the apps; let the apps aggregate over it.

The main thing that comes close is ActivityPods (although I don’t know how alive that project is)