Ask HN: Do you practice online minimalism? How?

  • Lets see:

    Gmail - no

    Outlook - no

    Protonmail - no

    Tutanota - no

    GitHub - yes

    Dropbox - no

    Standard Notes - no

    FC2 - no

    Amazon - yes

    iTunes - no

    GOG.com - no

    Steam - no

    itch.io - no

    Twitter - no

    YouTube - no

    FC2 (repeated above)

    HN - yes

    Stack Overflow - no

    Discord - no

    Linkedin - no

    Netflix - no

    Spotify - no

    Mubi - no

    Grammarly - no

    eBay - yes

    Bitwarden - no

    SimpleLogin.io - no

    Firefox Relay - no

    Firefox Lockwise - no

    So, 28 listed (removing the duplicate) yet only have four accounts.

    > What is your approach?

    A local (no cloud, not 'online') password manager. A manager is the only /reasonable/ alternative for tracking all the various sites that all want one to register an account for this or that use.

    > Do you maintain 100+ accounts?

    My password manager has about 350 "entries" in it -- not all of the "entries" are "online accounts". So taking 75% of that as likely "online accounts" that comes out to about 262 "accounts". Do note that most of those are retailers from which I've purchased once, but that failed to have a "guest purchase" option. The 'core' day-to-day usage entres over any given time period amounts to likely about 5-15 total.

    > Don't you think having 100+ accounts (even with a password manager) takes a mental toll on you?

    Not at all, because all the effort of "remembering" is handled by the manager. That is one of the benefits of using a password manager, all the effort of remembering "do I have an account here" and "what is the user-id/password for that account" is handled by the manager, which is a massive mental simplification. When a given account is needed, a short search either finds it, or I just add another to track it for reuse later.