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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]

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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] 111 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Please god no, don’t turn Lemmy into 4chan

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can now see that my post comes off quite naive/arrogant and I will try to be better. But I did want to say that there are gentler ways of correcting others without belittling them.

Also, this proposed feature would still tie the anonymous posts to the underlying "true" user account. It would simply not make that information public outside of the instance owner. 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? But I understand that I'm making a lot of assumptions here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You're right, but as you said, the reason I reacted this way is because of the way you posted it. I'm also taking out some frustration about everyone and their mother having some "great feature" or idea they want to suggest even if they haven't thought it through. For that, I apologize.

Maybe it could be done, but I'm quite sure that doing it correctly wouldn't be as simple as you think. I won't pretend to know how all of the software works, but I think it's safe to assume there are a lot of technical things to consider, especially when federating (and other fediverse software) comes into play. Realistically, I would see this as a waste of effort and a very low priority.