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.
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.