How many times have we seen people create throwaway accounts on these types of platforms? People often want to share something valuable yet intimate without having it be tied to their online identity for privacy reasons. Some folks create new accounts for this reason. Others decide to remain silent.
Why doesn’t Lemmy offer a simple checkbox when creating a post to indicate whether the OP wants their username to be publicly displayed or simply show up as anonymous? Furthermore, any comment that the OP makes on their anonymous post should be anonymous as well.
Benefits
- fewer throwaway accounts in the Lemmy database
- user will have ability to track their anonymous post(s) from their primary Lemmy account
- potentially less bot activity because anonymous posts will be originating from established Lemmy accounts instead of new accounts with no history.
Please god no, don’t turn Lemmy into 4chan
That is exactly what I thought of when I read this. Why would Lemmy implement such a seemingly obvious bad feature and become 4chan?
Also, the claim that this would prevent bot accounts is way off. Bot accounts still need an instance to register on anyways. The thing is, anyone can spin up an instance at any time All this “feature” would do is let them hide…
Great post to demonstrate how some ideas might sound good to you, but are actually just bad, lol.
I can now see that my post comes off quite naive/arrogant and I will try to be better. But I did want to say that there are gentler ways of correcting others without belittling them.
Also, this proposed feature would still tie the anonymous posts to the underlying “true” user account. It would simply not make that information public outside of the instance owner. I imagine it would be technically possible for a community moderator to issue a ban on the anonymous account (and thus the underlying Lemmy account) without the true username or email being exposed to the moderator? But I understand that I’m making a lot of assumptions here.
You’re right, but as you said, the reason I reacted this way is because of the way you posted it. I’m also taking out some frustration about everyone and their mother having some “great feature” or idea they want to suggest even if they haven’t thought it through. For that, I apologize.
Maybe it could be done, but I’m quite sure that doing it correctly wouldn’t be as simple as you think. I won’t pretend to know how all of the software works, but I think it’s safe to assume there are a lot of technical things to consider, especially when federating (and other fediverse software) comes into play. Realistically, I would see this as a waste of effort and a very low priority.
What are you on about? People can already be anonymous on Lemmy. This wouldn’t change that.
Yes they can, but idea is that actions can be more easily tied to usernames. Sure people can make a bunch of throwaways. But integrating anonymous posts would make that process not even needed with it turning into a feature.
It’s difficult to see how this could work without keeping the association between those posts and the person entity in the database. All it would take is one so-motivated instance admin to reveal the identity of the poster. It might still have value for low-stakes stuff, but it might give the end user the incorrect idea that their posts are truly anonymous.
But an evil instance admin would also be able to log the IP of the throwaway account too. So that’s not any better. The bigger issue is with the moderation side - how do admins deal with troll anonymous posters? Blocking an account is less useful when there’s no account. Arguably it could be a community-specific option to allow anonymous posting.
Given such a feature, I imagine it would be technically possible for a community moderator to issue a ban on the anonymous account (and thus the underlying Lemmy account) without the true username or email being exposed to the moderator?
The evil instance owner is a whole different story, but if such a thing ever came out the instance would be abandoned and blacklisted naturally, wouldn’t it?
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I can see the IP addresses of remote users. What I’m pointing out is that if a post was marked as anonymous on instance A, even if you trust admin of instance A the identity could be revealed by the admins of instance N.
Arguably if you are worried about remote admins, that’s not a problem-you just issue the creation of the Note without an owning user or pointing to a magical AnonymousCoward user and change the server code to allow that. Then when the note propagates across instances nothing links it to the original user. Of course the downside is the original user won’t get notified of replies to the post and such, but so much is the price of anonymity, I guess
Thats when you use a vpn or tor if you are doing a throwaway for whatever reason that you want to say something that doesn’t lead back to your main account.
I mean, they could also just match two accounts by ip in the db as well im pretty sure. That would be a pretty simple sql query
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Why doesn’t Lemmy implement this seemingly obvious feature?
It’s so obvious I won’t even mention it in the thread title
This one clickbait title will astound you!
You’re right, I edited my title to be less clickbaity. Apologies for that!
The ability to edit titles seems like an obvious feature that Reddit never added.
I didn’t think about it, but it does read like a buzzfeed
I imagine people are gonna abuse it for posting highly controversial takes that’s borderline immoral if not illegal… People already do even with associated username, imagine if it’s untraceable (by regular users) back to you. The nazis are gonna come out en masse, both who are trolling and actually serious. Seems like a moderation nightmare.
But people can already do that today! I mean sure there’s extra friction involved with the current system but I doubt its enough to stop a motivated nazi 😀
Yeah, so the system that is being proposed would make it even easier. Why simplify the process even further to the point it is a feature.
If it’s truly anonymous, as in the admin of that instance can’t even know where that comes from, then it’s truly a moderation nightmare. It is easier to spot and suspend/ban one person who makes multiple nazi posts or spam posts across different channels under one account, than it is with multiple posts from one person without any link. Even if it’s not truly “anonymous” on the admin end but only on the other viewing end, it is easier for other users to inspect and report from viewing that person’s history, which cannot be done when the posts cannot be linked to an individual. Of course, one can make multiple accounts, but allowing anonymous posts + multiple accounts would be even easier to automate hate speech/spam/disinfo/…
An option to mark an account as a burner when you create it could be interesting. Would allow for all kinds of unique functionality.
And have the option for a time limit for the account to be available. After that time is up the account is deleted but you can still see the posts.
I like it as an idea but fear it would be used by bots and scammers.
I think I see where you’re coming from. You just want an occasional “incognito” option for posts.
If I wanted to help out another user and share the story of my struggle with genital warts, I’d probably be more comfortable doing that if it wasn’t tied to my previous post history. Pour one out for Ken Bone.
My incognito posts would be subject to the same community standards as normal posts so if I used the feature to abuse or spam people, my real account would be affected.
I doubt there’s so much of a technical hurdle here as an ethical one. It comes down to whether you feel you can trust your (unpaid, volunteer) instance admin to not spill the beans about your genital warts, and whether THEY are happy being custodians of potentially sensitive PII. The inconvenience of a throwaway is also its main advantage: it isolates whatever sensitive thing you want to share from both you and the admin.
Metafilter had this back in the day. Exactly as you describe: just a checkmaek saying “post this as anonymous.” The admin would review and moderate these requests and if approved, move the post to an account named “anonymous” so that it was no longer even connected to the user at all. Then it would start showing up on the site. It was a good feature and met a real need. However I don’t think we need to be all “why hasn’t this happened already???” about it.
Requiring a moderator to approve anonymous posts is a great idea!
I’m sorry I did not mean to imply that his has never been done in the history of the internet. I was mostly referring to Reddit and Lemmy, and this is yet another feature that could help Lemmy differentiate itself.
Oh I wasn’t saying that you were ignorant of it ever having been done. I just found your wording a little confrontational for a feature request. “Why are you ignoring this obvious feature?” is a very demanding way to make a feature suggestion, especially with a platform that is currently undergoing extreme growth and no doubt many growing pains for the developers to handle. Just present your idea and why it would be highly valuable to many people. And then step back and realize that it must be weighed against a thousand other things you aren’t even aware are going on behind the scenes.
Looking back at my post, I totally see your point. I will try my best not to come off quite so confrontational going forward.
Good edit to the title 👍 thanks for hearing the feedback
Everything needs to be tied to a user at the protocol level. So the best way to implement this would be to generate a random username (GUID?), and set the display name to “Anonymous User”.
But then you might as well let the users do that themselves, and the user can delete their account when they’re done with it. Not that it would really harm to keep it around either way, just a couple wasted bytes in the database.
I think people would still create a throwaway to use once over using a feature that claims to make anonymous posts with your main account just to further distance any connections to the main account.
How does Reddit do it?
A person creates a new account, leaves a comment on a post, and I would assume just abandons the account never to sign into it again.
Good Idea
Maybe you would like Mainchan?
Might be able to set it up with an anonymous-reposter bot instead? Presumably this is for throwaway purposes more than confidentiality (the server owner will be able to track you either way) so having a bot (e.g. “@ThrowawayBot”) that you could private message and have them repost might work.
That‘s a cool idea and it‘d fit well into the Fediverse I think. Kinda reminds me of the 4Chan days.
I can imagine that in practice, this feature is not easily implemented. Not displaying the username is one thing, but that doesn’t make you truly anonymous. Your name would have to be hidden for the APIs and on the ActivitiyPub feed too.
