this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy

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Why doesn't Lemmy implement an anonymous post feature? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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?