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.
Metafilter had this back in the day. Exactly as you describe: just a checkmaek saying “post this as anonymous.” The admin would review and moderate these requests and if approved, move the post to an account named “anonymous” so that it was no longer even connected to the user at all. Then it would start showing up on the site. It was a good feature and met a real need. However I don’t think we need to be all “why hasn’t this happened already???” about it.