Abandoned Accounts

Cory Dransfeldt’s article It’s past time to delete your Reddit account reminded me of this overdue step. The Firefox bookmarklet of the PowerDeleteSuite worked great and deleted all my posts and comments before I waved goodbye.

This made me think back at other accounts that I have abandoned in an attempt to minimize my presence on, interaction with, and thereby contribution to surveillance capitalist platforms:

• Facebook, Messenger ⇒ deleted (easy-peasy)
• WhatsApp ⇒ Signal as much as possible (it’s hard)
• Snapchat ⇒ deleted (don’t judge me for ever being on there, back then I needed to know what the fuzz was about)
• Tumblr, WordPress, Netlify ⇒ personal website hosted on Sourcehut
• GitHub, GitLab ⇒ Sourcehut (keeping my account on Codeberg, though; still need to use Git[Hu,La]b for work)
• Twitter ⇒ Mastodon @chaos.social
• Spotify ⇒ PlexAmp (with an underlying self-hosted Plex), Bandcamp (took me longer than it should have—I love my personal collection of MP3s/FLACs—but I turned to Spotify for recommendations; now I get those the old-school way: supporting bands at concerts, friends, Shazam, Bandcamp, bands‘ Wikipedia pages)
• Gmail ⇒ Proton Mail on Mail Plus tier (Gmail forward and never looked back)
• Youtube ⇒ Suscribed to my favorite channels via RSS
• LinkedIn ⇒ …still on there (this platform is a shitfest, but I actually value my network and have a lot of acquaintances and professional contacts there with no other way of reaching)