More often than not, the best way to hide is to simply blend in with the crowds – this also encompasses one’s choice for a username. It is relatively simple to make a single throwaway account – just come up with a username, and off you go – however, if one makes throwaway accounts often, the task of thinking of a unique, and non-identifiable username can become a challenge. I would argue that poeple would often resort to using a pattern employing small changes for all subsequent usernames. Such patterns can be identified to a specific user if all users have their own unique patterns.
How can one reliably generate many unique-but-normal, and non-pattern-identifiable usernames?
Usernames are inherently pseudonymous, not anonymous. The distinction is often ignored, but it has a very big impact on privacy implications.
I use either Bitwarden’s random username feature (randomly generated word + numbers) or (a hash of) some random data. You could also do it offline and use dice rolls to select a word from the dictionary. I don’t think humans are capable of being random enough when it comes to this stuff, at least not long term.
And your username has enlightened me that the fediverse lets us have spaces in our usernames (?)
I don’t think ActivityPub puts many restrictions on usernames (no @ and a server defined length limit, I believe?). At some point Lemmy even allowed setting an invisible character as the display name! You can vary the length as well if you host the service.
However, what you’re looking at isn’t my username, but my display name. This is separate from your normal username and most Lemmy frontend use that if available.
You can set it in your profile settings, and change it later if you like!
Boost doesn’t seem to support display names other than on the profile page. It does, however, tell me that your account was created 6th of june 1923 :p
I like the ambiguity.
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