A session does not follow you across addresses

The two things that get confused

An account is a thing that exists in the market. Being signed in is a thing that exists between your browser and one particular address. The first travels between routes. The second cannot, because it was never a property of the account in the first place.

Almost every confused question about mirrors being different accounts is actually a question about this distinction.

Why it works this way

A browser keeps whatever marks a session for each host separately. Two different hosts are two different places as far as the browser is concerned, whatever is behind them. Nothing about being signed in on one causes the other to recognise you.

This is ordinary behaviour, it is the same on the everyday web, and it is not specific to onion addresses. It is only noticeable here because two hosts leading to one service is an unusual arrangement to be a user of.

What actually happens when you move

1. You arrive on the new route as somebody the market has not seen on that route.
2. Whatever front door check the market puts in front of new arrivals is presented again, because it is per route. See front door checks.
3. You sign in with the same credentials as always, because the account is one account.
4. Everything that was already saved is there, because none of it was ever attached to the route you left.

Why this looks alarming and is not

Being asked to sign in unexpectedly is a genuinely uncomfortable moment, because it is also what happens when something is wrong. The signal is ambiguous and the reader is usually already tense when they meet it.

The way to make it unambiguous is to know in advance that it happens every time you change route, so that when it happens it confirms something expected rather than raising something new.

The cost this imposes on switching

It is the main reason moving mid visit is more annoying than choosing at the start. Everything you were signed in for has to be re-entered, and any check has to be passed again.

That is why rotation is a start of visit habit and switching is treated as a separate subject with its own costs.

What is not lost

Nothing that was saved. Not the account, not the orders, not the message history, not the balance. The only thing that ends is the state of being recognised on the route you left, and that state had no contents.

Somebody who understands this can move between the three freely and treat the sign in as an inconvenience rather than a warning.

One thing worth doing before you move

Deal with anything typed but not sent, because that is on the page and the page is about to be left behind. This is the boundary described in what is dropped, and it is the only part of a move that can actually cost you something.

The reason this deserves more attention than it gets

It is the single most frequently encountered break in equivalence, and it produces a symptom that looks exactly like the thing readers are most afraid of. A sign in screen where you did not expect one is the shape of trouble.

Anticipating it converts that moment from a warning into a confirmation. This is one of the few places on the site where simply knowing something in advance changes how an event feels rather than what you do about it.

What this study is not. It is not a study about how long a session lasts or what ends one, which is a matter for the market and not for the number of its addresses.