Platform alternatives facts from the ground up

Everyone researching a move researches the destination. The facts that actually decide how the move goes are almost all about the place being left, and they are written down, in documents nobody reads until the week they need them.

What the incumbent keeps after you delete; what happens to addresses other people have already published pointing at your work.

Whether the account can be reclaimed, and by whom; whether anything you posted is licensed to the operator in a way that outlives your presence. This page establishes those, because a migration plan without them has a hole in it.

What to take away

The exit facts live in the incumbent's terms, help center, and account settings, and they are checkable in an afternoon before you commit to anything.
Deleting an account and deleting content are different operations with different outcomes, and the difference is usually stated somewhere.
Every address pointing at your work is a small liability. Knowing which ones you control is more valuable than any feature comparison of the destination.

The exit facts, and where each is written

Fact	Where it is written	Why it decides the move
What a full export contains	Help center, then the export itself	Whether you keep the archive at all
Whether deletion removes content or only hides it	Terms, deletion section; sometimes only the help center	Whether the old material stays public after you leave
What license the operator keeps after deletion	Terms, content section	Whether your work can still be used by the service
Whether the account name can be re-registered	Help center or the account settings themselves	Whether someone else can become you
What happens to shared links and embeds	Rarely stated; test it	Whether a decade of citations survives
Whether a dormant account is reclaimed	Terms or an inactivity policy page	Whether leaving a marker behind actually works
What the operator does with the data it retains	Privacy policy, retention section	The only part of this that is about privacy rather than logistics

Read all seven for the incumbent before you read a single feature comparison of anything else. They take about an hour and they change what kind of move is available to you.

Exit facts to verify

Export contents
Deletion removes or hides
License after deletion
Name re-registration
Shared links and embeds
Dormant account reclamation
Retained data use

Deleting the account and deleting the content

These are separate operations on almost every service and people conflate them constantly.

Safe deletion order

Export your data
Confirm export opens
Delete content or account
Check public interface
Check storage schedule

Deleting individual posts usually removes them from the service's public interface right away. Storage removal follows a schedule the policy may or may not state.

Deleting an account often differs: it can remove the profile but leave contributions in place, credited to a removed user, especially where the material is part of a conversation others wrote.

Neither behavior is unreasonable and neither is what most people assume. The way to find out is to read the deletion section of the terms and the deletion article in the help center, and where they disagree, to believe the terms and record the disagreement.

Where a jurisdiction gives a member a right to have personal data erased, the mechanism and its limits are set by that jurisdiction and its regulator, not by the product. The honest entry names the regulator to ask rather than stating what the rule is.

One practical note that is true regardless: deleting your material also deletes it from your own view. Export first, confirm the export opens, then delete. In that order, always.

What happens to your addresses

Every link anyone has ever published to your work is an address you do not control, pointing at a service you are leaving. When you go, those addresses break, and the value they were carrying goes with them.

It helps to be precise about what an address is made of, because only some of the parts are ever yours.

The host is the operator's. The path is the operator's. What you keep, if you keep anything, is a host of your own that can point at either.

Three cases, and they behave differently.

Addresses you control. Your own site, your own profiles elsewhere, your signature, anything you can edit. Update these first: they are slow, unglamorous, and where most retained traffic actually comes from.

Addresses on the incumbent, pointing to you. A profile you can leave in place with a pointer to where you went. This works surprisingly well and it is the reason not to delete an account unless the exit facts force you to.

Addresses on other people's sites. Beyond reach. What you can do is make sure that whoever follows one lands somewhere that explains where you went, which is only possible if the account still exists.

A destination that accepts your old identifiers, or lets you serve an HTTP redirect from a domain you own, turns this from a loss into a change of address. That capability is rarely advertised. Ask about it directly.

The general fix, and the only one that survives every future move, is to publish under identifiers you control from the start. That is what a persistent identifier is for in every field that has taken the problem seriously.

The claims worth testing on the destination

Only three, and each has a test that takes minutes.

Three destination claims to test

Claim

Import your data: Run on real export
Leave whenever: Test export day one
Audience follows: Ask what transfers

Test

Import your data: Record what arrived
Leave whenever: No commitment yet
Audience follows: Usually just a number

"Import your data." Run it against the incumbent's actual export file, not against a sample. Record what arrived and what did not. The entry format for a substitution treats this as two separate tests for a reason: an export that works and an import that works do not add up to a migration if the formats do not meet.

"You can leave whenever you like." Test the destination's own export on your first day, while there is nothing in the account you would miss. A service that cannot demonstrate an exit on day one is asking for a commitment it has not earned.

"Your audience comes with you." Ask what specifically transfers: contact details you can use, or a number. Almost always a number. This is the claim that is technically true and practically empty, and it is the one that most often decides whether a move was a good idea.

What no document settles

Whether the incumbent will still be worth staying on. Whether the destination will still exist. Whether the people you need will follow. Whether the operator will honor a retention policy nobody outside can audit.

Record these as sought and not found, and make your decision without them, because waiting for them is waiting forever. The overview of when switching is genuinely right sets out the conditions under which the answer is clear enough to act on, and they are all structural rather than predictive.

The migration facts that are the same everywhere

A few things hold across every category on this site and are worth stating once.

Migration facts that hold everywhere

Get contact route first
Decide acceptable audience loss
Group moves beat individual moves
Test file exports before needed

The contact route you hold yourself is the only thing that reliably survives a move, so get it first, not last. Some proportion of an audience never follows. Decide in advance what proportion would make the move a mistake; that's the difference between a decision and a hope.

Group moves work far more often than individual moves, which is why the notes on moving a community treat contactability as the whole ballgame.

For anything file-based, add one more: test what comes back before you need it, in the way the notes on testing a photo archive describe. An export nobody has opened is a plan nobody has tested.

Common questions

Should I delete the old account after moving?

Usually not. A dormant profile pointing at your current home keeps recovering people for years, and deleting it breaks every address anyone ever published. Delete it when the exit facts give you a reason, such as a retained license you object to, and not merely to feel finished.

The service says content is removed from view. Is it deleted?

Removed from view is a description of the interface, not of storage. If the distinction matters to you, look for a statement about storage, and where there is none, record that there is none. That absence is a fact worth having and it is common.

Can someone take my old username?

On some services, after some period, and it is usually stated in a help article about inactivity or username policy. Where it is possible, leaving the account in place is also an identity protection rather than only a forwarding address.

Does any of this differ by country?

The deletion and retention parts can, because the supervising regulator and the member's rights differ by jurisdiction. The logistics do not. The country gates a substitution has to pass cover the parts that vary, and the rule there applies here too: name the body to ask, and do not state the rule.