1. As far as I know, there aren’t any yet. Even if there were, I personally wouldn’t trust them for the same reason I wouldn’t use any Mastodon instance besides mastodon.social: if the PDS shuts down abruptly, your account is gone forever.
2. Bluesky and ATProto are designed specifically to hide the ways in which it’s decentralized.
3. I think this post does a good job visualizing how AtProto is different from ActivityPub.

This is for if you want to host parallel infrastructure. If you only want to self-host your own data, the instructions create a PDS are here, and the instructions to migrate an existing Bluesky account to that PDS are here.

Blame Apple I guess

As a matter of fact, Bluesky originally was supposed to become Twitter’s back end, but it was spun off when Elon took over. Jack Dorsey left and is now promoting nostr and X.

Bluesky is way more approachable than Mastodon. Most people don’t want to have to learn what an instance is.