ATmosphere Report #140 - its still all politics

Building a new social internet on open protocols is by its vary nature a highly political project. That social media has meaningfully shaped our society in the recent decade is such a true-ism that it barely feels worth stating anymore. I'm not saying something particularly shocking either by pointing out that the state of Big Tech platforms has political impacts. But the implication is that politics is a highly important lens to understand the new open social protocols. So politics will continue to play a main role in how I write about the ATmosphere, the fediverse, and everything around it.

Dutch Politics

The Netherlands had an election yesterday, with a clear win for centrist party D66. Further results of the election can be interpreted with whatever kind of story you want to tell. It's clear that the left lost, but to what extend you want to tell stories on whether the right and far-right lost depends on how you frame individual parties like VVD.

My interest is in which political parties actually use Bluesky, and how that relates to political parties and open social networks in other countries.

I'm not gonna do a very exact analysis, just a high-level overview to give some indication of what some of the political parties are, if and how they are using Bluesky, and what that says on politics and the open social web. My comparisons for parties in other countries are inexact, because real politics is complicated and local. Also, for context, there are 150 seats in Dutch parliament.

By looking at which Dutch politicians use Bluesky, and who is popular on Bluesky, you can get a sense of the political leanings of the Dutch Bluesky community. The main (not hugely surprising) conclusion is that Dutch Bluesky strongly leans left, with all varieties of left parties active users in Bluesky. Centrist parties do use Bluesky, but it is clearly part of a larger social media strategy. Rightwing parties barely use Bluesky, and far-right parties are not present on Bluesky at all.

The biggest outlier is Volt, which is active on Bluesky and much more popular on Bluesky compared to the wider electorate. Volt is a leftwing party with a strong focus on European integration, and more technocratic in their solutions compared to other Dutch left parties. That combination of being leftwing on social issues while also more focused on federation and technology compared to other leftwing parties makes Volt a fairly good analogue in ideology for Bluesky and atproto. But the Dutch election result also indicate that this vision only resonates with a small part of the wider population.

Worth noting: a lot of the most active adopters of Bluesky regarding Dutch politics are women, see Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema as another example.

US Politics

Some US politics news that is only indirectly related to Bluesky: Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congress candidate for Illinois, announced that she has been "charged in a federal indictment sought by the Department of Justice." Why I'm reporting on Abughazaleh here is because she launched her campaign as an explicitly Bluesky-first operation:

A second piece of US news: Graham Platner is a Democratic congress candidate for Maine, and he turned out to have a nazi tattoo. The Platner campaign is also active on Bluesky, and Bluesky posts regarding Platner were largely supportive. This shifted abruptly when the news of his tattoo came out:

What's especially interesting here is that sentiment on Twitter from Democratic voices seem much milder on Platner, compared to how Bluesky is highly critical of him.

I've written before about the perception of Bluesky as a 'left' space (here, here), but the difference in reactions from Democratic pundits on X versus Bluesky is an indication that Bluesky is indeed a 'left' space, and that this differs from the communities on X that are affiliated with the Democratic party.

The larger context of this is that how the Trump administration is relating itself to Bluesky. For further context on that, see this recent article by Erin Kissane.

https://www.techpolicy.press/trump-administrations-arrival-on-bluesky-highlights-growing-pains-for-open-networks/ External Link • techpolicy.press

The main implication here is that an authoritarian regimes are incompatible with spaces with their political opponents can freely gather, organise and communicate. That the DOJ goes after Democrats who have a high profile online (such as Kat Abughazaleh) is an indication that the Trump administration is aware of which politicians pose a relatively large risk for the regime.

That Abughazaleh has publicly declared that the base of her online presence is Bluesky, while the administration has already taken an adversarial position regarding Bluesky (for now limited to 'trolling'), should put Bluesky on alert that the current equilibrium the platform is in regarding the Trump administration is not particularly stable.

In other ATmosphere news

Longform writing and publishing

Leaflet has added polls! The feature is missing on Bluesky, but its cool another platform has it now. Leaflet says they're hoping other platforms will add polls as well, and that shared systems can emerge from that: "One of the cool things about ATProto is that we can coordinate gradually over time, and all the data is still out there, in a simple format, for us to build on!"

https://lab.leaflet.pub/3m4eb5htqvs2z/l-quote/9_0-9_475#9_0 External Link • lab.leaflet.pub

PiPup is a writing and publishing platform on ATProto. The platform also has a reader feed that shows all long-form articles published across the network over a variety of platforms, supporting Leaflet and WhiteWind, next to PiPup itself.

Bluesky

Bluesky is expanding their team, they've hired for Strategy and Operations, as well as DevRel, and have a variety of jobs open. The newest job they're hiring for is Technical Recruiter.

Alex is the new Bluesky DevRel, and he wrote a blog post on why Bluesky loves DNS.

https://leaflet.pub/c37b8a8f-f95b-4bce-9513-ebaaf8819c02 External Link • leaflet.pub

Bluesky also published an introduction to OAuth for developers:

https://atproto.com/guides/oauth External Link • atproto.com

Lycan is a search tool for your Bluesky likes, made by Kuba Suder.

https://journal.mackuba.eu/2025/10/27/launching-lycan-a-search-tool/ External Link • journal.mackuba.eu

Custom algorithms

GreenEarth is a new project to build personalised recommendation algorithms for atproto. The project has gotten 300k USD funding from Project Liberty, and was founded by Renee DiResta. The project has 3 goals:

Having freedom over which custom algorithm to use is one of atproto's most powerful features, and it's interesting to see that being reflected in which startups on atproto actually are able to attract funding.

https://www.greenearth.social/p/introducing-greenearth?hide_intro_popup=true External Link • greenearth.social

Speaking about algorithms, the For You feed is currently the hot custom algorithm for Bluesky. The latest update from Bluesky makes the 'post seen' status available for all feeds, not just Bluesky's own Discover feed. This is now implemented in For You as well (and this is how I'm finding out that Leaflet supports quotes in quotes in embedded Bluesky posts)

For You also has an interesting problem, in that the algorithm is highly effective in surfacing people's alt account unintentionally. The current solution from the creator is for people to opt-out of the For You feed via a DM, but that hardly seems like a scalable solution.

Parallel to this problem is the longstanding wish of Bluesky users to be able to opt out of the Discover feed as well.

It feels like Bluesky is struggling with transitioning their mindset from building something resembling Twitter to something truly different. Opting your posts out of the main algorithmic recommendation engine does not fit well with the Big Tech approach to algorithms on platforms. But it is clearly the way forward for open social protocols, and its time for Bluesky to catch up to that and let people be able to opt out of having their posts reach the Discover feed.

And some more tech

Tangled talks about the vision behind the project:

https://icy.leaflet.pub/3m47cll72hs25 External Link • icy.leaflet.pub

plcbundle is a new way to sync the entire PLC directory in a verifyable manner.

https://leaflet.pub/feb982b4-64cb-4549-9d25-d7e68cecb11a External Link • leaflet.pub

That's all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe right here on Leaflet to keep up to date, and if you want to read more related to the fediverse and the open social web, you can find more of my writing on connectedplaces.online

And if you want to know more about the challenges with coordination for building better moderation systems, check out yesterday's article:

https://connectedplaces.online/on-the-coordination-for-better-moderation-systems/ External Link • connectedplaces.online