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.
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.