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.
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.