01What happened
The story, straight
Dan Abramov published a blog post on June 19 explaining that ATProto — the protocol underlying Bluesky — has no 'instances' in the Mastodon sense. He argues the recurring HN comment 'but where are all the Bluesky instances?' reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the architecture. In ATProto, hosting and aggregation are separate layers: users publish to Personal Data Servers (PDS), and relay infrastructure aggregates that data into app views. There's no server-by-server moderation silo like Mastodon's federated model.
dan abramov (react guy) dropped a blog post clarifying what should be obvious: atproto doesn't have instances. every time bluesky hits HN someone asks 'where are the instances?' — that's a mastodon-brained question. the architecture is different: your posts live on a PDS, relays aggregate everything, app views render it. hosting and aggregation are separate layers, not bundled into one 'instance' the way mastodon does it.
02Spread timeline
Where it actually started
03Source receipts
Every claim, linked
04What's solid, what isn't
What's solid and what isn't
- Dan Abramov published 'There Are No Instances in ATProto' on June 19, 2026.
- ATProto separates hosting (PDS) from aggregation (relays) and rendering (app views), unlike Mastodon's instance model.
05Why it matters
The editorial take
The distinction matters because it addresses the most common confusion about Bluesky's decentralized architecture. Mastodon users instinctively look for instance-level communities and moderation, but ATProto was designed with a different philosophy — separating data hosting from app-level curation. As Bluesky scales past 30 million users, understanding this architectural difference is key to evaluating how moderation, identity, and portability actually work on the platform.
this keeps coming up because mastodon set the template for what 'decentralized social media' means in people's heads. but atproto built something structurally different, and the instance question reveals most people haven't updated their mental model. worth understanding if you care about how moderation and portability actually work on bluesky.