alt Hacker News> why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers?
Of course depends on the context, but in a lot of discussions about ATProto, ActivityPub, Mastodon and nearby areas, people talk about "instances" as in "ActivityPub instances that host my data and my profile uses its URL as a 'name'". The blog post is specifically for that context I think.
It's less about trying to hide around the issue, and more reframing how you see the concepts, as people start to associate words with concepts and structures. So when people talk about "decentralized social media", lots of people think about ActivityPub, which typically (always?) has a kind of federated architecture, and the instance is one of those nodes in the network. When these people see ATProto, instinctively (and perhaps rightly so) they literally ask "But why is there only one Bluesky instance that people join?" as those concepts map close to what they know.
Overall I think the post is a good and useful addition to the discourse, with perhaps not a completely novel perspective, but posted publicly for future reference when this inevitably gets asks again sometime in the future, specifically for the people who have these previous associations already formed in their head.
All of this goes away if we just do P2P social media.
Swarms of content.
Cryptographic identities and content signing/attribution.
Cryptographic hashes for content uniqueness/immutability.
Immutability in general.
Ephemerality (content lives as long as some node cares to retain it, otherwise it gets forgotten).
Concrete but extensible ontology for core concepts.
You don't need login. You don't need to agree on a common platform. 3rd party tools and extensions can filter content, provide trust graphs, interest graphs, etc.
You can just slurp up and score whatever might interest you. Your agent or algorithm might do pre-filtering against your preferred heuristics to downsample to relevancy.
You could write any client for this in any shape or form. Completely different look and feel for different people and interests / focuses.