Note that “instance” is Mastodon-brained and is a wrong way to think about atproto. The correct parallel is RSS / Google Reader.

Atproto has two types of things: hosting and apps.

- Hosting is like RSS. You can host your data on your own server and broadcast from it. It’s just an open source Docker container.

- Apps are like Google Reader. They aggregate from all hosts and usually build an index so they can show a rich view over the network. That’s what Bluesky, Leaflet, Tangled, etc, so.

So there is no “instance”. There’s hosting and there’s apps.