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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why doesn’t Lemmy implement this seemingly obvious feature?
It’s so obvious I won’t even mention it in the thread title
I didn’t think about it, but it does read like a buzzfeed
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.
