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.
- Bilb! ( @bilb@lem.monster ) 42•1 year ago
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.
- mustyOrange ( @mustyOrange@beehaw.org ) 2•1 year ago
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
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?
- Frater Mus ( @fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org ) 37•1 year ago
Why doesn’t Lemmy implement this seemingly obvious feature?
It’s so obvious I won’t even mention it in the thread title
- Scrubbles ( @scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ) 15•1 year ago
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.
- Hangry ( @kurogane@lm.helilot.com ) 5•1 year ago
I didn’t think about it, but it does read like a buzzfeed
- dill ( @dill@lemmy.one ) 8•1 year ago
An option to mark an account as a burner when you create it could be interesting. Would allow for all kinds of unique functionality.
- rosa666parks ( @rosa666parks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 2•1 year ago
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.
- laxu ( @laxu@sopuli.xyz ) 1•1 year ago
I like it as an idea but fear it would be used by bots and scammers.
- Max-P ( @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 4•1 year ago
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.
- NightOwl ( @NightOwl@lemmy.one ) 3•1 year ago
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.
- Match!! ( @match@pawb.social ) 1•1 year ago
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.