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i deactivated my bluesky account (for the reasons in the blog post!) and it turns out that deactivated my entire PDS, even though i'm on eurosky. that was unexpected -- bluesky still seems pretty tightly linked to one's PDS, unfortunately.

Bluesky is separate from you own PDS, it function as a separate PDS in this regard: You can have multiple PDS with active accounts on them, but only one PDS is authoritative, the one that your DID document (either did:plc or did:web) points to. You can login to those PDS separately with e.g. goat.

And deactivate accounts on PDS that you do not need anymore (e.g. Bluesky PDS). But it looked like you accidentally deactivated the account on eurosky, not the Bluesky PDS. You need to manually specify the Bluesky PDS when using goat after migrating an account. I wrote a bit about my journey ->

github.comgithub.com

Note that this document is a bit old and outdated, but most things still apply, also goat is extremely useful as a "last resort" tool, that always works.

i only have the one PDS! i migrated to eurosky a while ago and deactivated the original PDS back then. i meant that if you go to the bsky.app settings and hit "deactivate account", it will deactivate your entire PDS -- not just the bluesky parts.

When you started on Bluesky, you will always have an account on their PDS too. As far as I know you cannot delete an account there, only deactivate. When you "deactivate" an account in the client it will deactivate the current authoritative account you logged in -> eurosky.

Unless you explicitly specified to use your old account on the Bluesky PDS. You should be able to login to that, likely with a different old password and disable that PDS/account.

I see! That seems like it might be a limitation of ATProto then -- if you have a PDS and you have accounts on Bluesky, Tangled, and more, then deactivating is all-or-nothing?

That's good to know, thank you! But that's more like deletion than deactivation -- it's nice to know that I *could* come back in the future should I want to, and not lose all my data. Anyway, I guess it's a niche use case!

There is no deactivation. There are no separate accounts. There are only records, lexicons and OAuth sessions.

Yeah I get how it works! I'm describing a UX that I'd like to exist, that doesn't. I can see how the protocol makes that hard but as a user I don't care about the protocol, just the end result!