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?
Bitwarden has a username generator, doesn’t it?
Yup that’s where my username came from
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It does.
What the fuck. I never knew Bitwarden had a username gen until I went to checked to see if it did, and I immediately notice it
It’s fairly recent, and I don’t think they advertise it. It appeared one day in the generator. 😆
I don’t think it’s particularly good, but it’s something!
Must be a new feature. I developed a client for BW 6 months ago, and this was definitely not a thing.
It’s been in the Chrome extension for at least a year.
Must be client side only. TIL
It’s really not all that different from a passphrase generator
Well, the same thing, but just not part of the BW server API is all.
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It’s not a public project. It was based on their docs to be compliant though, much the same as the vaultwarden project.
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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Use a password generator in a password manager for the username AND password. Bitwarden is free.
Use a temporary email for email signups. getnada.com works fine, but so do many others.
Skiff is great. They even generate an @random.maskmy.id so you can type anything before @. It’s nothing new but great since you can set 5 static aliases also.
I agree
Don’t complicate simple, there’s millions of people making random shit usernames, the only ones that are going to wind up with a pattern are the people (trying) not too. Smack a bunch of buttons on your keyboard and call it a username. Done!
Or if you want to make more work, every password manager at this point will generate random usernames.
Or for even more work, use a password manager to generate a super secure password, and use that password as your username
I sometimes use MAC addresses as usernames.
Random nicknames are not recommended, they are unique identifiers, it is better to use nicknames of famous people or movies, video games, etc., because it makes it difficult to find them on the web, especially if different ones are used on each site.
this is a really good idea
Go to reddit, pick a username from the front page, use that. Any searching into your use of it will lead to that front page post and its reposts on click mills.
There’s user name generators. Even fantasy name generators too so it’s not a weird jumble of letters and numbers like a password.
I let Bitwarden generate my usernames for throwaway accounts. I don’t care if my username can be identified as Bitwarden-generated.
Good usernames are Google, Yahoo or Barrelroll, this is fun when someone searches for you by nickname
Pick a random book from your shelf.
- Open at a random page. Take the first word on the left page.
- Open at another random page. Take the first word on the left page
Repeat for as many words you like. Discard words you don’t like. Slam the words you like together.
Examples:
- thickestneedhelped
- ritestayoutdoors
- passedthejust
I see a pattern here…
Well I love your name 😍 one of the best characters
I don’t create anon accounts nearly as much as you say you do, but when I do I a correct-horse generator, and just pick the first two words and mash them together. It has never produced a conflict yet.
keepass2android’s password generator can generate these on mobile, and there are several for the command line.
I, too, was immediately going to recommend correct horse. It is random and it works.
English word + four numbers
That’s what you think, Michael
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Or if you want to be really fancy, you can just pick one of the Fantasy name generators: https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/
Draknolf Frozen-Fur, a Nord from Skyrim has a nice ring to it.
