This presents one of two possibilities:

A) The anonymous mode is still tied to an account, and so instances could choose to just not show accounts as anonymous, or users could just dig through modlog.

B) The anonymous mode isn’t tied to an account, making effective moderation nigh impossible, and spam very easy.

Neither of these are good.

Psuedo-anonymity like usernames breeds assholes (See: Basically every comment section/reddit/forum.) but actual anonymity breeds super assholes (See: Basically every chan.)

I personally don’t see the value. If I’d want to talk about stuff, I don’t want my username associated with, maybe

• the internet is not the right place to have this discussion or
• I wouldn’t want it associated to my account by any means, so would most likely create a burner account.

I also wonder if it wouldn’t make moderation harder?

With better meta moderation tools, like slashdot used to have, it would be good

But anonymous posting works already, you did it using a brand new account to post this post.

deleted by creator

It already is? Just create an anonymous account.

this place is anonymous, just make a burner account

Anonymity generally just gives people a pass to be even bigger assholes. I’m good.

I think it would be kind of like colliding Reddit and 4chan.

Wouldn’t mind, as long as there’s a (default on?) setting to hide anon posts and comments.

It would be basically an imageboard like 4chan. Those have their advantages and disadvantages. I think it should be a thing in principle but communities should be allowed to say they don’t want anonymous posts.

I’d be in favor of it. With a federated platform it’s impossible to keep someone from spinning up per-interaction accounts so we essentially need to deal with the costs of allowing anonymity anyway. It could be implemented in such a way that your host instance can connect the interaction with an account if there was some advantage to that but banning an account created to post something offensive and a moderator removing an anonymous post that’s offensive are pretty much the same action - and if a particular account was egregiously abusive there are technical ways we could allow the host instance to ban the user without compromising anonymity for other unbanned anonymous posts.

Oh, anonymous DMs should be absolutely disallowed. That’d just be an open invitation to dick pic spamming but, as nearly any open woman on the internet will tell you dick pic spamming is a constant issue.

Basically, it really wouldn’t make any kind of abuse easier and even if it was significantly abused to bypass needing to do account sign-ups for trolling there are pretty simple technical solutions to fix it.

@Hayley566@lemmyusa.com are you just asking a lot of questions to keep us busy? Or are you reading this, just not commenting (yet)?

How would blocking / muting work? I imagine anonymous posts to be, on average, worse that even burner-account posts.

How big the total lemmy userbase? We’re already anonymous.