cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/641590
Although i am quite a lurker in Lemmy, i don’t have the time to be an active contributor, nor i wish to give away too much personal information nor i want to add an unnecessary addiction into my life, which is why i don’t maintain a permanent account. However i do periodically have questions that I feel like only communities from Lemmy would be able to answer to my satisfaction, which is why i create burner accounts in my private window which i close after i am done with it.
But after creating many such accounts for this purpose, i feel like i am not doing it properly. I feel guilty abandoning accounts that take up space in servers of instances which are constantly fighting against spam and DDOS attacks; it feels like i am participating in the attack too. However i believe i should not delete the posts, for it may come useful for me in the future and for other people browsing the communities.
What methods should i adopt to further make my use of burner accounts in Lemmy more beneficial to me (in terms of anonymity and future account creations) as well as others (instances in terms of spam and members in terms of posts/comments)? Should I maintain a single account or permanently delete these accounts once i’m done with them?
For context, I use a VPN and Tor Browser and a disposable email for instances requiring email for account creation.
An inactive account is just an entry in a database. The impact on the server is negligible.
So you, as an individual manually doing things, aren’t going to DOS a server. If a huge amount of people did the same thing heavily, maybe (this was what the old “hug of death” from Reddit was; too many real users visited sites not used to that traffic). Probably don’t make a bunch of hyper active bots without awareness of the resource drain, especially on a smaller server, but good faith use shouldn’t be a major issue.
Realistically an account with a small handful of posts won’t either. A server is already mirroring a bunch of other instances and communities and one account with minimal activity just doesn’t take many resources.
You can delete the accounts if you want to clean up, but inactive accounts doesn’t affect the server nearly at all.
It’s probably good for all of us to sometimes switch accounts, because the idea here is to be semi anonymous. This is also why I’m against everything that will centralize Lemmy.
