The same happened with a neighbour of mine a few years ago. He was severely disabled and he spent everyday online on various forums. After he died (of natural causes - before Covid) his flat was cleared by the council, what a sad end to a life, as he had no family and I often wondered about those he knew online for quite a few years, some of which he'd known since the early 2000's. When alive he often talked about how forums had changed his life and gave him a purpose and then after his death there was no way to let anyone on those (unknown to us) forums know.
I often think that many who frequent forums such as this fulfil a real need for many. And there's people on here and many other forums who communicate sometimes personal stuff as well as content the forum is meant for who are scattered across the globe. Isn't that amazing?
A guy I used to roleplay with—a friend of a friend, although we'd got to know each other quite well— died suddenly a couple of years. He was in his early 40s and had undiagnosed health problems.
One unexpected consequence has been the inability of his family to 'wind up' his online life simply. Since he lost his job this had become the main part of his social life.
Last time I checked, he was still shown as logged into with Skype (though we can't figure out where), his YouTube account lies dormant, and from the emails still coming into his account (his brother has kept the computer running), he was a member of several online communities, mostly associated with his hobbies, but without access to the passwords, the effort required to contact all these parties individually has deterred his grieving family from pursuing it—the banks and card companies were effort enough.
He was a collector of games, books and models and 'backed' a host of Kickstarter projects—sometimes as investments. As these were mostly paid-up in advance, parcels are still arriving periodically in his name, which perversely keeps his death fresh in his parents' mind (they still own his home). No doubt they will dry up soon, but it's been a frustration at a bad time. A friend of mine committed suicide a few years before all this, and I can attest to the panic that was instilled when I woke up in the middle of the night to a notification of a Skype message from her six months after her death—her account had been hijacked by spammers. I knew, of course, that she was incontrovertibly dead, but those few unreasoning seconds before my conscious mind reasserted this fact released an adrenaline bomb into my system. Worse, everybody on her contact list received an identical message, and several had the same experience as me.
I keep on bumping into the suggestion that parents should leave some kind of posthumous message for their children to discover if the worst should unexpectedly happen ("If you are reading this..."), but it just seems too morbid for me to consider. I would suggest—although I haven't done so myself—that people leave an emergency letter that lists your major online concerns with access information to smooth the process for those left behind.
Amusingly, I've read numerous accounts—mostly from Americans—who have tasked themselves with disposing of their friends' and relatives' stashes of pornography before they are unearthed by 'more sensitive' members of the family. Where once this might have involved burning a stack of glossy magazines from the shed, Reddit suggests that wiping phones, deleting files and purging bookmarks etc. is now a rite of death!
