Delete very old inactive accounts

No don't do that.
It will mess up so many statistics.
What if Lily played 100 games? Those games have to be deleted and all ratings with the opponent she played is all messed up.
What if Lily decides one day to come back to Lichess to play again? She can sue or accuse lichess of deleting account without permission or something.
Bad idea.

@Lustforever is asking Lichess to consider releasing accounts that have been:

a) abandoned for years;
b) barely used.

This seems reasonable to me. The Lily accountholder has not used their account for a decade, and when they had it, used it twice to play the computer on level one, and that's it.

In the last year of teaching online, I've created dozens of accounts for my students. A number of them haven't been used for months.

I would think that it's probably difficult to "free up" abandoned accounts with lots of games just because those games would then connect with lots of other accounts. Perhaps it's for similar reasons that Lichess does not allow changes to account names; the instances of these names are propagated multiple times throughout the system.

But again, accounts that have almost never been used, that have never played rated games against other players, that have not been used for years... for all I know it could be beneficial to Lichess to have those accounts archived and erased from the active database. And, to the OP's point, why not allow new users the shot at using some of these OG usernames?

Given that accounts are free, I don't think anyone could reasonably get angry or litigious with Lichess. Imagine the argument: "I started my free account ten years ago! I never used it! And you had the audacity to close it?"

not such a bad idea.
though deleting accounts seem a bit extreme.
maybe there could be a new system that allows you to use the usernames from inactive accounts.
but when the user comes back you would have to change your username again.
maybe lichess could allow taking usernames from +1 year inactive accounts.

Chess.com staff will rename old and inactive accounts upon request, to "free up" the username. So yeah, I think it would be good for lichess to be able to do this as well.

@Lustforever No.

Why?
1. What if @Lily wanted to come back to Lichess?
2. It will mess up so many statistics as #2 said

Hope I helped
Have a good day :)

I think he has a point. @Lustforever
this @Lily has 2 game in 10 years, i dont think she's coming back

there should be a system to put them to sleep or delete them after a certain time of inactivity

(just one doubt. we can report that account?? just to release the domain of that name??)

To delete one account it has to be done from the database, which can also mess other things up.

We don't want to do that.

deleting @lily s account can mess up statistics and what if she/he comes back.
Hope this helped