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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 aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] bilb@lem.monster 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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 2 points 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

[–] aCosmicWave@lemm.ee 1 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?