Taking control of your atproto account

In atproto backed services, like Bluesky, your identity and all of your data lives in your repo on your PDS (Personal Data Server). If you signed up through Bluesky it's one of their servers, but there are lots of other services that offer atproto accounts, each one maintains one or more PDSs. There are community run ones, and it's not a huge lift to just run one for yourself. At the time of writing this there are more than 6,000 PDSs in different states of activity. Each handle, like @jola.dev, maps to a DID (Decentralized Identifier) document that represents your identity, and contains the canonical reference to where the account data lives: your PDS server. These mappings are maintained by plc.directory. You can see mine here. Atproto is designed around the idea that you own your own identity and data, so it would be a big problem if the maintainer of your PDS could suddenly decide to delete your account or shut down the server, leaving you without access to your identity. The…