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.
If it’s truly anonymous, as in the admin of that instance can’t even know where that comes from, then it’s truly a moderation nightmare. It is easier to spot and suspend/ban one person who makes multiple nazi posts or spam posts across different channels under one account, than it is with multiple posts from one person without any link. Even if it’s not truly “anonymous” on the admin end but only on the other viewing end, it is easier for other users to inspect and report from viewing that person’s history, which cannot be done when the posts cannot be linked to an individual. Of course, one can make multiple accounts, but allowing anonymous posts + multiple accounts would be even easier to automate hate speech/spam/disinfo/…