For those of you who are about to delete your account(s)
I know and understand you. There are reasons, hell, you have reasons to delete whatever account it is you want deleted.
But download your own data first. Archive it. Zip that archive and push it into some automatically syncing folder between local and cloud, so that you can work around data degradation for a longer period of time.
Because you put whatever it is, whatever it was, you put it together and you had reasons for that.
Besides, the companies which used to host your account and your content are not ever deleting whatever it is you made and uploaded, shared and wrote: that is how valuable it is. That is the value of data.
Because neither do these companies know what all this data might be useful for, but they suspect that it will have a purpose in the future.
That purpose is being an archive.
Now, I would normally type something like “welcome to..” and then call it whatever weird stylistic anachronism I could come up with, but I won’t. I don’t trust people who name things. I am moving away from giving things names.
You are using a computer. Parts of what you do with your computer live on someone else’s storage drives. You should learn how to make copies of your own data, and store it well.
Companies like Twitter or Facebook will not be around forever. The next fire sale is always around the corner.
Save your data. Then delete your accounts/make your data unavailable for people outside the company.