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.
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.