A Guide to Digital Spring Cleaning
Hello dear readers! Spring is here and in the air. It's a time of renewal, of fresh starts. Of walking without sweaters. We shake off the last of the cold and get ready for the warm months to come. It's also a time for cleaning! And while you're tossing out all your winter trash, stashing away your snow tires, putting away your coats and mitts and just generally freshing up your life, why not also do a little bit of digital Spring cleaning too?
Remembering to clean up your online presence is really important, especially for you fellow animal lovers out there! It's so easy to forget about that site that you signed up for that one time and then never thought about again, or those private conversations you had with someone in a chat that never deletes, or those files that you're keeping on your computer that you never look at but also could be potentially damaging if you ever happened to misclick and send them in the group chat rather than the funny meme next to it.
Digital cleaning is a bit of a hassle, absolutely! But just like any kind of cleaning, it feels much better once it's done, and you don't have to worry about the amount of junk piling up that one day you might trip over and really hurt yourself! And, the best part is, it's not that hard to start! When you're doing Spring cleaning, the best advice tends to be to cut big jobs into smaller pieces so they seem more managable. You can do that with digital cleaning too!
Let's start with account safety first. We want to make sure that you wash all the unused profiles on you from the internet, and replace the passwords on the things that you do use so that everything is nice and fresh and not hacked in a data leak you weren't aware of. A great place to start is with your emails! A lot of sites that you sign up for are going to send you emails about it when you join! So if you search for terms like "Welcome", or "Account", or "Verification" (for email verification), that can be a good way to find all the sites that you've signed up to in the last year or so. Are there any that you don't use anymore? If so, it might be a good idea to close those accounts! You never know when a site might decide that it wants to suddenly add your geographical location to your account without telling you (looking at you Twitter!), or reveal other personal information about you that you might not want out there. And that's before we even start talking about data breaches! If you're even a little bit worried about a site having anything more than your IP address, and like, it's a site you don't use anyways, you're probably better off just deleting your account. And hey, while you're in your email, why not finally take yourself off that spam email list that you've been getting annoyed by for the last 6 months! You deserve it!
Once you're done with the trash, now it's time to touch up the stuff that's staying. Get all the accounts that you do want to keep, and then change their passwords! It might seem like a hassle, but getting hacked is one of those things that you need to prevent before it happens, not after! If you use a password manager, it's easy as pie to change things! Just generate a new password for each site, and then delete the old one (or keep it in a private notepad just in case!). If you're someone who uses the same password for everything, let this be a sign for you that you should stop doing that, and switch to a much more secure random generation of letters, numbers and symbols instead!
With that big step done, next up is... Taking a break! That's right! Like I said, we're doing this in steps here. For now, why don't you go and make some iced tea, and then once it's good and cold, we can take it outside and really appreciate the weather for a bit.
Take 8 cups of cold water, 3 bags of earl grey tea and 2 bags of peppermint tea. Boil the water and then add in the tea bags. Then, cut up half a really juicy lemon, and throw that in too. Finally, get a sprig of lavender and slap that shit around a little bit to relieve any stress you might have in your body after all that cleaning, before adding that to the mix as well. If you have orange bitters on you as well, feel free to add a dash of those as well for a more citrus-y taste! All done? Pop that bad boy into the fridge while we move onto our next cleaning task! This one'll be easy!
As zoophiles, we tend to have a lot of online connections. And that's awesome! Online friends are great! But, if I say words to you in person, those words are carried away in the air, forever gone into the aether. Conversely, when you say things on the internet, they just kinda live there forever until the end of time. When it comes to living a clean, mess free life, that's a big nono! If your friends get hacked, or if they end up accidentally giving up their data because of a mistake, you don't want to have a bunch of junk on their device that could get you in trouble! And likewise, you don't wanna be the person who ends up collecting a bunch of other people's junk and then getting it all revealed because you accidently left one of your devices accessible. It's one of those things that everyone believes would never happen to them, even though I know multiple people it has happened to. Better safe than sorry!
Some chat applications have the ability to set auto-delete timers on them. Many do not. The ones that do, it's probably a good idea to use them! Set them for one year, that way you've got plenty of room to reference previous things that you've talked about, while also not having to worry as much about people going through your trash! For the applications that don't do that, you'll have to get in there and scrub on your own. The easiest way to do this is just to delete your conversations fully, and then start new ones. That tends to be the best way to delete history. But, it depends on your platform! Sometimes deleting the chat on your end will still leave it for the person on the other side. Discord, for instance, is really bad about this. If you delete a chat, the other person can still see it fully. Even if you block them. You can individually delete every message in your history, but depending on how long that history is, that can take a while! There are scripts you can get that can help such as DisDeleter, but your experience may vary. And even then, you can only delete your messages, not theirs! Same with places like Twitter. Messages are cached on each side, although new features do seem to allow you to have message deletion on a timer so that helps a lot. Some surfaces are harder to clean than others, so if you don't like cleaning, maybe switch to different kinds of cookware going forward from here to make your life easier!
Phew! That was more work than I thought! Still, you're most of the way through your Spring cleaning now! And hey, you deserve a break! A real break this time, not more work! Your iced tea should be just about done by this point, so why not get that out of the fridge, and then head outside and soak in the sun for a bit. Offer some tea to human friends, family, or partners that you may have around, and enjoy their company for a while too. The only thing that makes a great day better is spending it with people that you love! And they'll be shocked with the complexity of your very interesting and very herbacious iced tea! Don't be afraid to lay in the grass, and stare up at that big blue sky for a while, and watch the fluffy white clouds slowly drift by you. It's important to take time for you! Once you're done, we've got one last Digital Spring Cleaning task to take care of, before you're all done!
We've talked a lot about cleaning as it comes to the ways that you interact with the rest of the world, but what about the things that need cleaning directly inside your house, or in this case, your computer and devices! Listen, I get it. Sometimes you just have some weird stuff downloaded. I have SO many article thumbnails, research papers, and drafts saved onto my computer. Anyone with a minute in my file explorer would immediately figure out that I've spent more time researching zoosexuality than anyone that doesn't have skin in the game. And, sometimes those files are scattered amongst other files that I need for things like work or taxes or school or just other things I want to send to people. It's not a very efficient system, and that kind of clutter is both dangerous and unproductive, so let's clean it up!
First of all, get rid of the things that you don't need anymore. There are probably TONS of things that you don't need that are just taking up space in your hard drive. Applications you haven't opened in years, or saved pictures that you needed once and haven't opened since. A great way to go through things is to sort by last modified, and then go oldest to newest. If something hasn't been used in the past 12 months, there's a good chance you can send it to the bin and you won't regret it. Past that, you might need to sort through things a little bit more, but I would recommend junking things liberally. It's pretty easy to find things again on the internet! After you get rid of the things you don't need, you should be left with things that you do want to keep! From there, now's a great time to create some kind of sorting system, if you don't have one! Organization is amazing, because even though it might take time now, it ends up saving you time in dividends down the road! Make a folder for your memes, your games, your art that you want to save. Keep things neat and tidy, and then the next time you want to clean up your files it'll be a thousand times easier!
And hey, look at that, suddenly everything is looking a lot cleaner around here! And you got some bonus iced tea out of it all! What a great way to start the spring! It's easy to let digital cleaning pile up, and end up as this towering thing that feels impossible to tackle, but it starts with starting, and from there it only gets easier. You can clean up your online footprint and make sure that you're staying safe and clean online, so you don't have to worry about anything slipping through the cracks. All it takes is a little bit of effort, and you'll have a clean and beautiful digital home that you can feel confident inviting people into!
Happy Spring dear readers! Enjoy the warm weather, and we'll see you in the next one!
Article written by Tarro (April 2026)
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