In the strangest of places

One recent cleanup task I didn't mention was deleting some work stuff from my personal laptop. It was several months into my current contract before anyone decided I needed corporate network credentials, so I couldn't use the company laptop and had to work on mine. When a reason to get those credentials arose and I got them, I copied everything over to the work laptop and resumed a 2-laptop lifestyle.

Since I was cleaning stuff up anyway, the outdated copies of everything I'd worked on were low-hanging fruit, so I deleted that folder. It was backed up to OneDrive and I got a message about whether I wanted to delete the documents for everyone and thought, yeah whatever. But then a scenario flashed in my mind wherein I somehow accidentally created links to those on my work laptop rather than copies. My blood ran cold even though that situation, if true, would likely be fixed easily by grabbing something from the trash. But I confirmed that the ones on my work laptop were still there and backed up on a work instance of OneDrive. Phew!

The update I promised about YouTube provided another lesson in checking first. After deleting all those old videos and my channel for my original YouTube account, that account did indeed disappear from the opening screen on the YouTube TV app. I checked my second-oldest YouTube account found it didn't have a channel, just likes and Watch Later. No videos meant nothing to delete, so I thought I'd check the TV to see if there was an option to simply remove it from the screen. I didn't start there with the first account because the last time I thought to try to clean up that screen, it didn't have that option. But it does now, so I removed the second account.

All of that reminded me that I used to use the "like" feature on YouTube more, and there was probably some interesting stuff in the like list on the oldest account. But that's gone now and I won't worry about it. I'll check on the second account sometime. I already reviewed its Watch Later list and didn't find anything that mattered much. I'm still happy with my decision to nuke that first account, but it's funny to learn after the fact that I could have just removed it from the TV.

It's nice to know Google will actually add features to their apps that they don't just delete because they got bored with them. I should see if I can get them to introduce a sound leveling feature to YouTube Music. I know Spotify offers that but I refuse to give Spotify any money. I haven't deleted that account yet, but I found its replacement for the only thing I used it for, podcasts. Now I'm using PocketCast for the two shows I still listen to, Text Me Back and Melrose Place Cast. Eventually I'll probably start listening to more of them again, but for now the time that I used to devote to podcasts goes mostly to TV and movies. I generally only listen to podcasts when I walk, and thanks to water fitness, I walk way less than I used to.

I've strayed quite far from the original theme of checking first before deleting files and accounts, but a new one is suddenly on the chopping block. I use TimeHop every day to look at old tumblr and Facebook posts, and today's journey started off interesting because three years ago was when I tested positive for COVID. But the app froze and crashed, and kept freezing and crashing over and over. I'll try one more time this afternoon and if it doesn't work, I'm done trying for the day.

I just checked the app to see if it can tell me how long my streak is, and I've been using it since 2016. And in that process I just noticed I can connect Flickr, which I either didn't know, or forgot. The idea's intriguing for sure, since Flickr's the most comprehensive nostalgia source I have. There's also really no good way to review it all except for TimeHop, because breaking up the archive by day lets you see the whole thing over the course of a year.

Ok I just answered my own question. I'll connect it and cross my fingers that the app stops crashing.

Since I'm in an archiving and deleting mood, I finally got around to an account that's been on my list for many years: my first YouTube account. It bore the name of my old hotmail account and might even be older than my original gmail account, which would account for the name. It's certainly from before a time when there was a full suite of Google apps integrated with a single sign-in. I just saved 61 of 63 videos from that channel, it was easy to see from the thumbnail that a couple could just go away forever.

Now I have two YouTube accounts. The oldest is linked to the aforementioned original gmail account and has no videos because I wasn't interested in putting videos on YouTube again until 2016, and by that time we had one for our home domain. In 2016 I taught myself how to edit video and returned to YouTube to unveil the video I'd dreamed of creating for years.



Funnily enough, that video has way more views on Facebook than on YouTube, and did pretty good numbers on Tumblr, too.

YouTube says I have "about 709" videos on my current account, and I can tell you from memory that the bulk of that is time lapses and walk route videos. I can't imagine getting rid of this account because, like with flickr, hundreds of blog posts have that content. And now, I do my water fitness playlists on that account as well.

The older account with no videos has almost no reason to exist at all. When we switched to YouTubeTV as our TV provider, you had to sign in with a gmail account, and it couldn't be a personal domain one. That was a frustrating time because I'd be signed in to YouTube on the home domain because that's where all my stuff was, but I had to switch over to the original one a lot for TV administration purposes. That led to a "Watch Later" list on the older account that hasn't been added to in four years. At some point I need to go look at that list to see if there's anything I actually want to watch, as I'm sure there are a few fun surprises in it.

But other than that, everything that matters to me on YouTube is now in one place, and just like with my TikTok, there's a folder of old videos on our server from an account that's now gone.

A silly thing I'll admit is that a big part of why I deleted it is because I got tired of seeing the account in the list to select from when we open YouTube on the TV. I haven't opened it yet, but now I should only see two. I never signed into that old one on the TV, but it was tied to one of the other accounts, probably the second oldest one. More on the TV part of the saga later because I don't want to wait to post.

While I was busily saving my old TikTok videos yesterday so I could delete my account there, I got an email to my primary account from my old primary account, saying my gmail storage was 84% full. That got me thinking about how I don't really need anything from my original gmail account at all. I still use that address as my primary email, but since 2022, all my emails have forwarded from it to an Outlook inbox on our home domain. And for a long time before that, we used Google instead of Microsoft products, so my gmail inbox that bears the same name as my Outlook one has many years of messages up until that day in 2022 when we switched over to Outlook. It was April 21, I just checked.

It takes a whole lot of email to fill up a gmail account, but I spent a lot of years emailing a group of friends all day, every day. While a lot of us are still friends, the last version of the group fizzled out a couple of years ago, but it was a good 20+ year run. The gmail philosophy is to archive instead of delete, so I had tens of thousands of conversations in there, as well as google chats from back when I used it. It was wild to see little glimpses of all of that going by on the screen as page after page of emails were permanently removed.

But there was really no reason to keep it around. In spite of what Google tried to make everyone think, if an email is one you want to keep, it shouldn't be stored in a repository with everything else. Otherwise, how do you know what to keep when it's time to delete some? That's really why they did that, because they want to sell storage to people they've trained to keep everything. It ain't me, babe. These days, I have a folder for things I think I'll need to see at some point and I'll keep indefinitely. And for things I order online, I have a folder for email notifications regarding those orders, and they get deleted once I have the item. And I don't bother putting orders from major sites like Amazon and eBay in there.

I keep some documents on Google Drive and don't really need to move them. Especially now that I got that account so empty it shows as 0% full.

One thing I've seen people say on Facebook ever since I created my account on the site is that they miss LiveJournal. I'm so tired of it! LiveJournal never went anywhere, and the people who say it are the ones who left a long time before the site was sold and a lot of people migrated to or mirrored on Dreamwidth. There's a group on Facebook called Livejournal Lives that has almost 4,000 people and it had two posts in 2025 and none in 2024. And someone a lot of people from LJ know even considered making a similar site, but private and thus even less likely to have anyone posting anything.

All of which is to say, LiveJournal didn't go anywhere, and the people who miss it should resume posting. I get it, there's no critical mass any more. But there can't be unless people start telling their stories again, whether or not they get much attention. It's more important than ever, now that other sites and apps are becoming overrun with slop and their UIs make it harder to see just the accounts you want to.

If you want the internet to be good, you have to make good internet. (And I fully acknowledge that the people who I should be saying this to aren't here to read it.)