How many Dutch accounts are there?

AT Protocol has no country field. Accounts carry no location, and neither the identity records nor the profile records say where someone lives. So we do two things instead: we count the Dutch accounts we can point to, and we model how many there probably are in total.

Time to get nerdy with numbers!

Short answer: at least 11.313, probably around 230.000.

Updated 31/08/2026

Two main numbers

Confirmed unique Dutch accounts11.313deduplicated DIDs

Modelled totalestimated

The whole bar is the modelled total. The filled part shows the DIDs we have confirmed today, while measurements are ongoing: 11.313 of ~230.000, about 4.9%. That share climbs the longer we measure, though it will never reach 100%.

The confirmed number can fall as well as grow: we drop accounts whose Dutch evidence is gone, like an expired domain.

Nobody counted the modelled total; we derive it below.

What these accounts show

Every did:plc identity has a public log, and every repo lists the collections it holds. That tells us when these accounts were created, where they run, and which apps they use. This covers the 11.313 confirmed accounts, not every Dutch account.

When these accounts were created

2023/022023/082024/022024/082025/022025/082026/022026/08

Creation date from the PLC directory, by month. This is when the account was made, not when we identified it.

Which apps they use, beyond Bluesky

Only 676 accounts (6%) of the 11.313 use anything other than Bluesky. When they do, this is what they use:

standard.site225

community lexicons176

Anisota170

Flashes158

Pinksky57

mu.social49

Sifa48

Tangled46

Tokimeki30

Leaflet28

popfeed.social26

bookhive.buzz23

stream.place20

pckt.blog17

Accounts holding records from that app in their repo, counted once per app however many record types they hold. Bluesky's own collections are left out, since nearly everyone has them. This counts accounts, not records. This only sees apps that write their own records. A client that just reads Bluesky data, like Skywalker or Graysky, leaves nothing in a repo and so cannot appear here, however heavily it is used.

By record type

site.standard.publication 208 accounts
site.standard.document 189 accounts
net.anisota.beta.game.log 159 accounts
net.anisota.beta.game.session 159 accounts
community.lexicon.payments.webMonetization 153 accounts
blue.flashes.actor.profile 150 accounts
blue.flashes.feed.post 105 accounts
net.anisota.harvest.minigame 65 accounts
social.pinksky.app.preference 57 accounts
social.mu.newsFeedPrefs 49 accounts
id.sifa.profile.self 43 accounts
sh.tangled.actor.profile 42 accounts
id.sifa.profile.position 41 accounts
site.standard.graph.subscription 39 accounts
id.sifa.profile.education 37 accounts
id.sifa.profile.skill 37 accounts
id.sifa.profile.language 37 accounts
id.sifa.profile.externalAccount 31 accounts
id.sifa.graph.follow 27 accounts
social.popfeed.actor.profile 26 accounts
tech.tokimeki.poll.vote 25 accounts
buzz.bookhive.book 23 accounts
net.anisota.beta.game.progress 22 accounts
blue.flashes.actor.portfolio 20 accounts
social.popfeed.feed.listItem 20 accounts
sh.tangled.feed.star 20 accounts
sh.tangled.graph.follow 20 accounts
id.sifa.profile.certification 19 accounts
place.stream.chat.profile 19 accounts
sh.tangled.publicKey 19 accounts

Where they run

Bluesky hosted 92.5% elsewhere 7.5%

765 accounts (7.5%) live on a PDS outside Bluesky's own hosting.

eurosky.social 475 accounts
Also get a Eurosky account!
atproto.brid.gy 155 accounts
pds.wsocial.network 23 accounts
bluesky.emiellr.nl 7 accounts
emphisia.nl 5 accounts
mijnbluesky.nl 5 accounts
bsky.kairu.nl 5 accounts
bluesky.zark.nl 5 accounts
blacksky.app 4 accounts
blauwski.nl 4 accounts

Where each number comes from

deduplicated total11.313

Posted Dutch8.081

Dutch domain2.308

Starter pack1.279

Companies142

Self declared location24

found only by this source also found by another source

Each source finds largely different accounts. Summed they come to 11.834; deduplicated by DID, 11.313 remain.

Posted Dutch 8.081: They have posted something in Dutch where we could see it.
How we measure this
From the public Bluesky firehose: we sample posts over several days, keep the ones language-tagged Dutch, and collect the accounts posting them. Accumulated over time, so it only grows.
As of 2026-08-31 · ~5h firehose sample
Dutch domain 2.308: Their username ends in a Dutch domain, like .nl or .amsterdam.
How we measure this
From the PLC directory, the network-wide registry of every atproto identity: we scan each account's current handle and keep the clearly-Dutch domains (.nl, plus city and region domains like .amsterdam and .frl). A full scan runs for hours, so this number climbs until it finishes. We re-check this list daily: if the domain lapses or the account disappears, it stops counting.
As of 2026-08-31
Starter pack 1.279: Someone put them in a Dutch starter pack, a hand-picked list of accounts to follow.
How we measure this
From a curated list of clearly-Dutch Bluesky starter packs: we read each pack's members via the AppView and union them.
As of 2026-08-31 · 31 packs
Companies 142: A Dutch organisation whose own website domain is the account.
How we measure this
From Sifa's entity database: NL-based organisations (by recorded HQ country or a .nl website) whose website domain is itself an atproto account.
As of 2026-08-31
Self declared location 24: They wrote a Dutch location in their Sifa ID profile themselves.
How we measure this
From Sifa ID profiles: accounts whose profile lists a location in the Netherlands.
As of 2026-08-31

What we model

The floor only counts those who make themselves visible. Anyone posting in English, without a Dutch domain, in no starter pack, stays invisible to all five detectors. To reach a real number we have to stop counting and start modelling.

46.184.219Bluesky accounts
× 0.761%
~350.000Dutch-speaking accounts
× ⅔
~230.000in the Netherlands

Every step above is an assumption.

How big the ecosystem is

Bluesky has around 46 million accounts (bsky.jazco.dev/stats). We use this as the base to scale from. The wider AT Protocol identity count is higher, but includes bots, spam, and deleted accounts, which is what a full PLC-directory crawl like sifa.id/stats counts.

How much Dutch gets posted

We sample the public firehose and count posts tagged Dutch. About 0.761% of posts are Dutch, measured over a window of roughly 18 hours. Every account we see posting Dutch goes into the floor above. The true total is higher: many Dutch speakers post rarely, or in English.

What could be wrong

Language is not country. Dutch is also spoken in Belgium and abroad, so we scale down to the share of Dutch speakers who live in the Netherlands (roughly two thirds).
Many people here post in English, especially the developer crowd this community is built around, so they never show up as Dutch and go uncounted.
We measure posts, not people, and then use that to estimate accounts. Someone posting fifty times a day counts fifty times as heavily as someone posting once a month, so the mix of posts is not the mix of accounts.
Our firehose sample drops messages under load, so the measured counts are lower bounds.

Most of this pushes the count down rather than up. If the estimate is off, it's more likely too low than too high.

Check it yourself

The measurement scripts live in this site’s repo. They read the public Jetstream firehose, need no login, and print the raw numbers.

uv run scripts/estimate-nl-users.py 86400 nl-24h.json

tangled.org/atproto.nl/website, the scripts live in scripts/.

Make this number better

The floor rises as detection improves, and you can help: set a Dutch domain as your handle, put a Dutch location in your Sifa ID profile, or curate a Dutch starter pack. More visible means more countable.

Updated 31/08/2026