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.

So this is that post.

RSS and Google Reader

I know RSS is still being used somewhere (podcasts?!) but its heyday is arguably behind. Which is a shame. For a few years, which some of us might fondly remember as the golden age of the web, it felt like blogging was a cool thing.

Now look at this picture because it’s going to be important:

alice's blog cat's blog bob's blog google reader feedly

As a reminder, you publish stuff on your own blog, which you can either self-host or host on a popular blogging platform.…