for myself, if i can recover passwords etc, i delete the account to lower the possibility of that data being used to train ai, and to lower the numbers of registered accounts they have.

i think stakeholders are more likely to see accounts being deleted as worse than an inactive account, because people can always come back to an inactive account.

so many websites are eager to keep users by making it difficult to delete accounts, or by adding a 14 day wait before they'll delete an account, etc., so that alone makes me think they want even inactive accounts for usage statistics or to steal data from.

I would advise against deleting your account. When you delete your account you also forfeit your username which can then be used to impersonate you. While I'm not sure on the exact math, it would seem logical that having a stagnant account keeps up their costs but doesn't bring in almost anything resulting in a net loss on an account basis.

With "deletion" you're simply advancing the moment, they're supposedly "deleting" your data; something I refuse to believe, they actually do. Instead, I suspect they "anonymize", or effectively "pseudonymize" the data (as cross-referencing is trivial, when showing equal patterns on a new account; would the need arise). Stagnation wouldn't require services to take such steps, and any personal data remains connected to you, personally.

For the Gmail account, I would recommend: not deleting the account, opening an account at a privacy-respecting service (using Disroot as an example), connect the Gmail account to an email-client (like Thunderbird), copy all its contents (including 'sent' or other specific folders) to a local folder (making sure to back these up periodically), delete all contents from the Gmail server, and simply wait for incoming messages, at the now empty Gmail account.

If a worthy email comes in: copy it over to the local folder, and delete it from the Gmail server. For used services, you could change the contact address to the Disroot account, and for others you could delete them, or simply mark them as spam (and periodically emptying the spam-folder). You may not want to wait for privacy-sensitive services, to finally make an appearance, and change these over to the Disroot address right away.

I've been doing this for years now, and my big-tech accounts remain empty most of the time. Do make sure to transfer every folder, and make regular backups!

I’ve been manually deleting all my actions on my sites. No engagment brings stats down. Then deactivating!

I wish there was a way to infact just poison every one of my interactions. That would be far more fun.

Instagram/Facebook I would just delete. Maybe make a final post explaining why you're deleting and say "find me on Pixelfed" just to help spread the word.

For Reddit, I love when see people replace every comment they ever made with a link to Lemmy before deleting their account. Reddit shows comments from deleted accounts so they stay up. There are apps that will do this for you.

For Gmail just hold onto and have it forward to your new address in case someone tries to contact you that way. But also back it up with Google takeout in case Google randomly decides to delete the account (rare but it happens).

Just don't use them beyond the minimum. I need facebook to keep in contact with some people I know and for groups on there but I just check in once a week or so. linkedin I need for job hunting. once I retire I will keep it around to give people recommendations if I need to. honstely I abandone twitter but I only ever made one to stake my name. youtube is nice to keep track of creators I like but I mostly watch it not logged in. got rid of my reddit because the federation covers that.

Send an email to people you care about with your new email, they reply or not it's OK you still have their email address anyway, no big deal.

Source : I've migrated away from GMail.

I would recommend just hiding/removing your content on social media then let it go inactive. There may be some reason in the future you need to utilize the service (looking at you events that are only organized on facebook and restaurants that only post their hours on instagram)

Should you delete your dead accounts, let them be taken over by some spammer or wait for a password leak?

My process is to rewrite old posts with generic text like "this message has been deleted" or something along those lines.

Then I choose to delete the post and after some period I would delete the account.

This prevents a company from eating up your past history as AI training data or recovering your deleted posts to some extent.

i just keep them. do backup all useful data from the accounts even if you don't remove them tho. for gmail setup forwarding to your new mail account.

I have an old Facebook account that I've lost the password to. I still have access to the email it's associated with, but to reset the password (and subsequently delete the account) I'd have to prove my identity to Facebook. Which I can't because I didn't use my real name.

Now the account is oxidizing on Facebooks servers; I sometimes get "someone tried to log in to your account" emails and I'm like "go, take it, have fun!".

Basically, if I can I delete old accounts, if I can't... Well its not my servers that get cluttered with old shit.