Election Day on November 3 is far from the end of the 2026 US midterms. Votes often take a while to get counted, there are likely to be dozens if not hundreds of lawsuits and battles about certifying elections, and grassroots groups around the country are preparing to mobilize if the federal government seizes ballots, invokes the Insurrection Act, or shows other signs of trying a coup. Disinformation and rumors are in high gear, and instead of trying to stop it centralized social networks like Xitter, Instagram, and Threads are reducing visibility of pro-democracy activists and organizations. It's a great chance for the ATmosphere to shine.
The ATmosphere is an ecosystem of decentralized social networks including Blacksky, Eurosky, Bluesky, Leaflet (where this blog is hosted), Graze Social and much much more. It's quite small compared to the big centralized social networks, with just a few million active users. Still, quite a few election defense, voting rights, and civil rights organizations and experts are there, along with some election officials and a lot of media. Combine that with some innovative technology, and at least in the US it can be a very good place to follow the news -- whether or not you have an ATmosphere account.
So here are a few suggestions about how best to leverage the ATmosphere to keep up with the news about the US midterms.
Custom feeds
One of the cool things about ATmosphere apps like Blacksky, mu.social, and Bluesky is that it's fairly easy to set up a custom feed on whatever topic you want.
Voting Rights News' Curated Election Defense feeds have posts from election officials, voting rights and election protection experts and organizations, and other credible sources. Unlike the other feeds I'll discuss, these focus more narrowly on election defense (voter suppression, voting rights and election protection, election-related disinformation, legal threats, and preparing for mobilization if that's what's needed).
As well as a national feed, there are feeds for almost a dozen states. If you've got an ATmosphere account, you can pin these (or any other) feeds to make them easily accessible in the app you're using ... but you can browse them even without an account.
feeds.voting-rights.news is a one-stop shop that makes it easy to toggle through the various feeds. The interface isn't particularly polished (I prioritized working on the feeds which wound up taking longer than I had optimistically hoped), so it has links to view them directly on Blacksky, mu.social and Bluesky if you want to explore in more detail.
Graze's midterms.graze.social provides an election-focused algorithmic feed for each state, and also highlights trending topics and shows LLM-generated summaries for each each state. If you log in, you can choose the state you're interested in, and the algorithm will take who you're following into account.
If you're in California, or just interested in the elections there, CalMatters' 2026 CA Midterm Election is a great resources, with high-quality California-focused updates from well-curated list of sources.
And Bluesky has their own Midterms 2026 algorithmic feed, with posts from "hundreds of local reporters and independent newsrooms from across the US, plus a selection of national reporters and analysts." At least so far the quality of information here has been solid. Personally, I find it a bit overwhelming; for me the added state-specific focus of Graze's and CalMatters' feeds, and the topic-specific focus of the election defense feeds, work better. But your mileage may vary ... and really, that's the whole point of custom feeds: you can pick the ones you want.
Labelers (aka moderation services)
Another cool thing about the ATmosphere is the ability to subscribe to multiple moderation services (also known as labelers), which complement the default platform moderation. Here are some of the ones I find particularly useful.
Blacksky's moderation service covers for White Supremacy or Antiblack Rhetoric; Misogynoir; Antiblack harassment; Digital Blackflace (non-Black accounts pretending to be Black, especially important from an election defense perspective); Fatphobia; and much much more. You can subscribe even if you're using mu.social or Bluesky instead of Blacksky.
Northsky's labels include Queerphobia, Transphobia, Biphobia, Acephobia, Enbyphobia, Homophobia, and Whorephobia. From an election perspective, the Republicans who are trying to stoke and leverage anti-trans hate are also the ones trying to subvert democracy, so it's very relevant.
Latinsky's moderation service plays a similar role for topics including anti-immigrant harassment and anti-Indigenous harassment. Just as with Northsky, it's very relevant to the election: Republicans stoking and leveraging anti-trans and anti-Indigenous hate and disinformation are also trying to subvert democracy.
The XBlock Screenshot Labeller is great for those of us who would rather not see screenshots from Xitter and other centralized social networks. It's not perfect, but it makes a big difference! As well as being annoying in general, these screenshots are often filled with hate, bigotry, and disinformation ... so once again, very very relevant to the election.