The anonymous political arena.
PARA is the political social network built for communities, policy votes, RAQ flows, civic agents, and protected participation on top of the AT Protocol.
-3 to +3
policy vote range
#POLICY||
structured political flairs
2nd layer
cross-network civic context
About
Understand why PARA exists, how democratic friction shapes the product, and why the site is organized around a second political layer.
Learn more →Try app
Launch the live PARA experience, request a build link when needed, or use the local runbook when you want full control.
Learn more →Schemas
Browse the `com.para.*` reference pages and see how the technical layer maps to the app surface.
Learn more →Each card names the surface, the friction it reduces, and the next place to read when you want more detail.
Problem
Makes political positions visible, comparable, and easier to act on.
PARA starts from a simple premise: democracy stays thin when public opinion is hard to express clearly and hard to turn into civic consequence.
Second layer
Lowers the cost of participation without asking users to abandon their audience.
PARA can link identities, publish across networks, and carry political context wherever public discussion is already happening.
Flairs + voting
Turns generic posting into structured political input.
PARA introduces #POLICY|| and #MATTER| so users can separate policy design from issue attention, then vote with both direction and intensity.
RAQ + communities
Helps people locate themselves politically instead of posting into one undifferentiated crowd.
The RAQ helps users question themselves, place themselves politically, and generate structured data that communities can organize around.
AI + search
Makes the network useful for reading, comparison, moderation, and external tools.
PARA is meant to power more than a feed. Search, clustering, classification, and generation turn civic data into usable product utilities.
Trust + infra
Balances protected participation with public trust.
PARA combines anonymity where freedom of thought needs protection with validation where civic participation needs grounding.
The source app already includes routes for communities, RAQ flows, representatives, cabildeos, policy dashboards, messages, moderation, and verification settings. The site should explain that shape directly instead of falling back to abstract social-backend copy or generic startup language.
Most people can tell you what feels wrong in politics, but very little of that opinion becomes material. PARA starts from the idea that democracy fails when making yourself heard is too slow, too expensive, too opaque, or too socially risky.
PARA began with political-compass memes and Democracy 4 because they make ideology legible. The product thesis is that people should be able to locate themselves, disagree selectively, and vote on policies without buying an entire partisan package.
Collective and individual agents, political search, AI-assisted writing, and anonymity tooling sit on top of Bluesky-derived infrastructure so the differentiated investment can go into cryptography, data, and political intelligence.
Developers should be able to read this site in two directions: product-first if they are learning what PARA does, or protocol-first if they want the records, services, and lexicons. The information architecture should support both without switching mental models.
Product layer
The app exposes communities, participation routes, trust settings, and communication tools that should be legible before anyone opens the schema browser.
Protocol layer
Lexicons, records, xrpc methods, service boundaries, and repository semantics describe how those surfaces are stored and moved through the stack.
Reference layer
The public site should bridge product language and protocol language so the docs read like a coherent system rather than disconnected notes.
