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.
  • Hombrus@lemmy.hombr.us
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    1 year ago

    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.