People act and speak differently depending on who they’re with.

Web-forums of old didn’t unify a user’s identity like Lemmy does. One forum was held at one domain, hosted by one set of computers and administrators; another forum had a separate domain, set of machines and administrators. Identities on one forum were not correlated to another. A forum dedicated to cars had no reason to know about the you that also posted to a forum about crocheting.

Software has been trending towards centralized identities. This never made sense to me as it’s diametric to how identities operate in real life. Your employer knows one side of you and your friends another, which is still different to the you you might show to your partner.

This centralization stems from surveillance-capitalism’s desire to surveil and tie independent pieces of information to one real human, creating a higher-resolution profile of that individual from which the subject becomes easier to exploit. Monied software has been the impetus. Free-software is affected by that dominant culture of surveillance-capitalism. The temporal context is pertinent and Lemmy functions with one central-identity interacting with a multitude of separate communities.

Creating separate identities on separate instances of Lemmy is possible, but it doesn’t change Lemmy’s design and that design seems to be a reflection of surveillance-capitalism. The very fact that you can view a user’s previous posts appears voyeuristic, being pointless outside of that context for users.

I am a proponent of anonymity. The ability to write posts anonymously or under different identities would be welcome. That central-identity (that is the Lemmy account that’s established on a particular instance) could still exist for the purposes of administration. I would also like to see finer grained controls for the user’s content and profile.

What if the user does not want a public profile at all? What if the user does not want a long-term identity? Creating a multitude of identities on one instance could be perceived as spam or malicious activity. Allowing the user to create sub-identities that are not publicly attached to that central-identity would still allow for ordered administration whilst empowering users to share what they want to share with a particular community without also exposing the entirety of an identity.