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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 3.488, probably around 230.000.

Updated 25/09/2026

Two main numbers

Confirmed unique Dutch accounts 3.488 deduplicated DIDs
Modelled total estimated
The whole bar is the modelled total. The filled part shows the DIDs we have confirmed today, while measurements are ongoing: 3.488 of ~230.000, about 1.5%. 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 3.488 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 922 accounts (26%) of the 3.488 use anything other than Bluesky. When they do, this is what they use:

standard.site 302
community lexicons 242
Flashes 217
Anisota 201
Pinksky 74
Tokimeki 64
Tangled 64
mu.social 60
Sifa 54
popfeed.social 33
Leaflet 32
skyblur.uk 28
bookhive.buzz 27
stream.place 24

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 282 accounts
  • site.standard.document 261 accounts
  • community.lexicon.payments.webMonetization 212 accounts
  • blue.flashes.actor.profile 207 accounts
  • net.anisota.beta.game.log 187 accounts
  • net.anisota.beta.game.session 187 accounts
  • blue.flashes.feed.post 140 accounts
  • social.pinksky.app.preference 74 accounts
  • net.anisota.harvest.minigame 72 accounts
  • social.mu.newsFeedPrefs 60 accounts
  • sh.tangled.actor.profile 59 accounts
  • tech.tokimeki.poll.vote 53 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.self 48 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.position 47 accounts
  • site.standard.graph.subscription 46 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.language 43 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.education 42 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.skill 42 accounts
  • id.sifa.profile.externalAccount 33 accounts
  • social.popfeed.actor.profile 32 accounts
  • id.sifa.graph.follow 30 accounts
  • sh.tangled.publicKey 29 accounts
  • net.anisota.beta.game.progress 28 accounts
  • uk.skyblur.post 27 accounts
  • buzz.bookhive.book 27 accounts
  • sh.tangled.repo 27 accounts
  • social.popfeed.feed.listItem 25 accounts
  • sh.tangled.graph.follow 25 accounts
  • net.anisota.player.state 24 accounts
  • social.popfeed.feed.list 24 accounts

Where they run

Bluesky hosted 92.7% elsewhere 7.3%

1.004 accounts (7.3%) live on a PDS outside Bluesky's own hosting.

Where each number comes from

deduplicated total 3.488
Dutch domain 2.254
Starter pack 1.246
Companies 150
Self declared location 25
found only by this source also found by another source

Each source finds largely different accounts. Summed they come to 3.675; deduplicated by DID, 3.488 remain.

Dutch-speaking accounts

Accounts we have seen posting in Dutch. This is NOT counted into the floor above, deliberately: Dutch is also spoken in Belgium, so the language does not tell us which country someone is in. Roughly a third of Dutch speakers live in Flanders.

18.719 posted Dutch

  • 698 independently confirmed by another source
  • 18.021 this signal only, so country unknown
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. It feeds the estimate further down, not the floor.

Dutch domain 2.254

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 2026-09-04

Starter pack 1.246

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 2026-09-25 · 31 packs

Companies 150

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 2026-09-25

Self declared location 25

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 2026-09-25

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.

  1. 46.184.219 Bluesky accounts
  2. ~350.000 Dutch-speaking accounts
  3. ~230.000 in the Netherlands

Every multiplication 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

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/atcommons.eu/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 25/09/2026

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