hold your handles
Aditya tweeted about discovering Visa through his Thoughts on the 8.9 Earthquake in Honshu, Japan post. Check out Visa's tweet in response:
you really never know what people will pick up on 15 years later
That serendipity from having persisted on the Internet in the long run aligns with Brittany's experience with social media in I'm Old, and honestly think you should consider holding onto your social media accounts even if you don't want to use them anymore.:
People from long ago also sometimes contact me on these platforms! I only get to it months later but if they are interested in talking to me that still counts.
If you haven't yet nuked your social media presence, when was the last time you went in and checked what people were up to? If you so choose to log back in after who knows how long, has anyone contacted you there in the interim? Perhaps you could surprise yourself with what has changed for people you used to know or could catch up with. Like Visa's example shows, it's possible that entirely new people could enter your world too.
Yet, the opposite is true in that old friends can exit your world even easier. Their account deletion, neglect, or inaccessibility can instantly sever your connection with them indefinitely. In some cases, it's not just your connection to them that you lose, but most or all of their expression which you and others enjoyed.
In addition to social media, decay impacts other kinds of websites too. Just read the title of this Ahrefs post, Link Decay: Analysis Shows 66.5% of Links Are Dead, for a taste of how prevalent link rot is. Are you sure you need to assist it by erasing your presence wherever it is?
Don't underestimate how sentimental your online past can be for yourself and other people. Take Visa's example above. Take Brittany's example of her Star Trek fanfiction that she regrets deleting, only to find fragments of her brother's handwritten sequel many years later. Take my example of wishing that fellow posters that I linked to would preserve their blogs and websites indefinitely. Even if your online past is peppered with unsavory moments, there are surely experiences had and memories made that are worth preserving somehow.
When was the last time you archived your online adventures? How comprehensively did you archive them? You only truly own what you have saved multiple copies of, stored in multiple formats and locations. With how you can reminisce old stories or use them to serve new ones, are you doing them justice by keeping them as available as possible?
Besides securing your personal safety, what other compelling cases exist for deleting accounts, websites, and other online artifacts anyway? Having spent countless hours over almost 2 years maintaining this blog, I can't think of a good reason to delete it. Same goes for other social media and website presences I have maintained or neglected throughout the years. However, having seen even established writers flirt with the idea of deletion more than once, maybe they have reasons to share that you would find valid? On that note, does your penchant for privacy outweigh a profile of your past that can still serve as a portal for your present?