Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Writing work emails - the struggle
Sunday, March 09, 2025
Sentimentality and Digital Clutter
Over the years I've created multiple accounts on different platforms and most of them I don't even log into anymore.
But the idea of just deleting them is hard for me to do.
When I log in there are memories, there's information that I don't want to lose, and pretty images that I'm still drawn to. There's still a sense of community that I don't want to lose access to. But that sense of community is an illusion.
Again, I don't maintain these accounts anymore. One of my blogs hadn't had an update since December 2019. That was easy to delete; the posts where only my own and only one year's worth; it was easy to copy everything to Blogger and then delete the blog. But I have another that has over 800 posts. Most of them are shared posts from other people's blogs, with information that I still want to hold onto. It doesn't make sense to copy those onto this blog, they're irrelevant to what I'm doing here, but I still don't want to loose access to the collection. Some of them I've started copying onto my computer, with links to the original posts. (Some of the blogs don't even exist anymore.)
As websites and services age, the companies are beginning to purge unused accounts. Facebook and Yahoo deletes accounts if they haven't been logged into for a certain number of years. Google has started doing it, Photobucket and OneDrive are doing it ... it makes sense because server space is finite. Xanga doesn't exist, MySpace completely revamped and purged the content of the existing accounts. So eventually, these unused blogs and social media accounts of mine are going to get deleted. Some of them already have; in that case I've been using the Wayback Machine to get some of the content.
Here's to scrapbooking my digital life!
