Cool idea, but I'd also worry that anonymous profiles would make Lemmy feel like 4chan.
Sometimes just having a public profile (even behind a made up username) is enough to make people act more courteous.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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There's a lot of value for online communities in pseudonymous reputation.
If somebody writes something that I'm tempted to respond to, but I think might be a troll, I can look at their profile and make a much better decision. If I'm a moderator and I need to decide between a warning and a ban, a look at their profile often tells me whether a warning will be productive. If I'm thinking about doing some kind of trade or transaction, I can see if they have a reputation to lose by cheating me.
Fortunately, it's easy to have multiple pseudonymous accounts on something like Lemmy if you don't want those identities overlapping.
My understanding is that the anonymous profile thing won't really work. That's as far as ActivityPub is concerned - one of the protocols behind Lemmy, Mastodon et al.
Every person/bot/whatever which comments, posts, upvotes; any social "activity" must have an independently verifiable public identity (via WebFinger). Here are some example identities:
- my Mastodon account: otl@hachyderm.io
- a random kbin account: density@kbin.social
When some "activity" is performed by that identity, a message is delivered to many (many!) servers. They could be running anything but we commonly see Mastodon, Lemmy, Meta's Threads (soon?).
Each server can really do whatever it wants with that message. For example:
- I posted this photo from a Mastodon instance (via @otl@hachyderm.io)
- The Mastodon server also delivered a message to !motorcycles@lemmy.world.
- The Lemmy server at lemmy.world stored it in a big database so subscribers can read it.
- @ganksy@lemmy.world replied "Wild and chilling landscape".
- Lemmy stored the reply and also delivered the reply to @otl@hachyderm.io.
- Mastodon stored the reply in its own big database so I can read it.
Coming back to the OP:
That was a long winded way of saying we should have (optionally) private profiles in lemmy.
Here is some service's idea of what @otl@hachyderm.io is:
- kbin
- lemmy.sdf.org
- Threads: https://threads.net/@otl@hachyderm.io (not yet!)
There's no way to make a profile private because there isn't really a profile to begin with. What we really have is just the activity received from @otl@hachyderm.io. The whole thing feels a lot more like email than popular social networking sites when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
Old-school mailing lists archives also offer a way to search for posts by author. e.g. Richard Miller
I still think the idea of casual privacy applies. There may be no way to hide all my activity, but there's no need to give everyone one a sortable, searchable profile page one click away either.
I agree. ActivityPub messages are not necessarily public information; implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy just assume it - and there's nothing stopping the services relaying the messages elsewhere afterwards.
Actually in my fiddling with ActivityPub I've made some posts and comments to a Lemmy instance which were not relayed to other instances, even though they would have been if I made them using Lemmy. So there's definitely opportunity for systems to implement features inbetween "totally public" and "single recipient".
I think at the very least, Lemmy needs to have better support for multiple alt accounts.
We don't have a RES like equivalent yet, but at least the mobile apps are getting there. I miss Reddit Boost's ability to hit comment and then pick an account to comment from.
(cont)
...and then switch to this instance without even leaving the page. It's smooth as hell.
Liftoff handles this amazingly. I can comment from this account...
that just makes spamming, vote manipulation, astroturfing, brigading, more easier.
It does, especially on foreign instances since they (supposedly) can't see the IP addresses
But I think a balance is necessary. Some people will NEED privacy if they want to talk about things that they could get in trouble for (with work, school, or an authoritarian government). I had alts for lots of stuff on Reddit, like if I had a medical issue that was identifiable, or if I wanted to share some creative work I did. Others might need it to talk about their views on religion, their sexuality, or about friends/family.
I don't see how lemmy would have better support, I suppose you mean the apps
The apps too, but it would be nice if the default UI supported it. Similarly, they don't support having multiple accounts tied to the same email address (and I don't think they're going to do it anytime soon)