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.
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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