There Are No Instances in atproto — overreacted
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A conceptual explainer arguing that atproto (the protocol behind Bluesky) has no 'instances' — a term that only makes sense in Mastodon's federated model. The author draws an analogy to RSS and Google Reader: in atproto, hosting and app aggregation are separated at the network level, so your data lives in portable hosting you control, and any app can aggregate over it. This contrasts with Mastodon's model where identity, hosting, and the app are bundled into a single 'instance'. The post explains why asking 'where are the Bluesky instances?' is a category error, and argues that atproto's decentralization is richer — users can swap hosting providers or build entirely new apps that read from the same shared data layer.
