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.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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
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, wouldnβt it?
Why doesnβt Lemmy implement this seemingly obvious feature?
It's so obvious I won't even mention it in the thread title
This one clickbait title will astound you!
You're right, I edited my title to be less clickbaity. Apologies for that!
The ability to edit titles seems like an obvious feature that Reddit never added.
I didn't think about it, but it does read like a buzzfeed
An option to mark an account as a burner when you create it could be interesting. Would allow for all kinds of unique functionality.
And have the option for a time limit for the account to be available. After that time is up the account is deleted but you can still see the posts.
I like it as an idea but fear it would be used by bots and scammers.
Everything needs to be tied to a user at the protocol level. So the best way to implement this would be to generate a random username (GUID?), and set the display name to "Anonymous User".
But then you might as well let the users do that themselves, and the user can delete their account when they're done with it. Not that it would really harm to keep it around either way, just a couple wasted bytes in the database.
I think people would still create a throwaway to use once over using a feature that claims to make anonymous posts with your main account just to further distance any connections to the main account.
Might be able to set it up with an anonymous-reposter bot instead? Presumably this is for throwaway purposes more than confidentiality (the server owner will be able to track you either way) so having a bot (e.g. "@ThrowawayBot") that you could private message and have them repost might work.
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