There is a place for that. It's called 4chan.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Close the fediverse, we already had a solution
Sounds ripe for spam.
There is fchan if you want the 4chan experience with activity pub intervention
There's a 4chan equivalent that uses activitypub, I just forgot the name.
You mean like: !greentext@sh.itjust.works ?
Or is it too early and a joke went over my head?
I keep seeing people go to the effort of creating a throwaway account to say or post stuff they want or need to externalize on the threadiverse. I'm willing to bet that for every person that goes to that much effort, there are likely somewhere between 10-100 people that lack an outlet and motivation to do the same. Greentext is just a mutual pretext on my part for genuinely caring about people under pressure right now and in need of an outlet in a way that is not really well supported by the fediverse or activity pub.
We are small enough here that regular names and people can hold meaning in familiarity and memorable history. Kind words and social interaction anonymously from these may hold considerably more value and meaning within this social dynamic that is not afforded elsewhere.
Aha, I see. So you mean there should be a community for anonymous posts. I think it's not inherently supported with ActivityPub. But I guess someone could create a bot that all posts went through. However for very obvious reasons the community would need to be moderated VERY efficiently.
Yeah, I'm kinda volunteering for the mod part. In truth I think it would take the respective instance admin setting up such a thing specifically. Like create a throwaway or something so that the actual user is not propagated to other admin or the full activity pub feed being transported. The one instance admin would know and have the ability to filter or block, but that information would never escape the one server. As a mod I would be blind to actual potential bad actors and only filter at the liberal community and comments level. So basically a normal community that replaces the OP name with Anon, and never shares the real ID with anyone.
One could make a community named "Anon Posting" or something, lock it so only a mod can post, and then make the sole mod a bot that would post anything it got via DM (probably after automoding, rate limiting, etc) to said community.
I do think it's a good idea for the bot to keep a log in case it gets abused for sufficiently evil purposes. One could add some extra functionality to the bot that would give identifying information about the poster to instance admins on demand (via DM), but I think instance admins would have pretty easy access to all DMs made to the bot, along with identifying information anyway. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.)
Also, the bot could totally delete its logs and with them the identities of all posters after a while. Maybe a month?
And, of course, this wouldn't be ironclad anonymity. But it would keep identities secret from anyone but the bot maintainer and instance admins.
Yeah, sounds like a pretty cool concept. Not volunteering to write such a bot (at least any time soon) or anything, but I support it.
Fesshole
I bet you could create a system that runs someone user and domain thru a hash to produce a different alphanumeric value. Display that value instead of user@domain.
So not exactly like 4chan, in that everyone has a user. But a username that is isolated from rest of fediverse.
That would allow for 'confessions' type posts to not be linked to a standard account. And preserve ability of mods to ban the racists and trolls.
I'm not coder. But it seems possible.