Why would I do that?
> You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving
If Bob goes full Pessoa and creates 20 different heteronomies I'm all for it, but unfortunately that never quite happens and you get the gist of Bob1, Bob2... Bob20 being all the same person pretty fast.
> and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet.
This place seems to function decently well, at least for now, and I didn't even have to give them my email address.
Because its fully anonymous chat/discussion. I'm wondering if you have experience with anonymous chat where identities don't matter.
Unlike you, I have experienced it back in the day. So I think I have a thing to say or two about anonymous chat, the tactics that occur on those forums and how meme culture spreads, how the community uses memes to "defend" themselves and establish a group identity, etc. etc.
If you don't care about identities, you'll likely build a system that turns into 4chan (or something like it). That's all I'm saying.
When you say things like:
> I'm not at all interested in their identities.
Well, that reminds me of 4chan. That's all. If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that. I do suggest you try it out for a bit and figure out why its culture is the way it is.
> This place seems to function decently well
Because moderators like @dang come around here and ban accounts that engage in these activities.
Mastodon allows for the servers to "ban" other individuals or even servers that are misbehaving, so its not fully anonymous or unmoderated. Its not as trusted as a central server though (like Twitter was). Hard to see where everything will end up.
> If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that
I'm not really interested in the identity of people posting here, the same goes for reddit. As I said, I have been quite happy with this state of things for 15 years now. They might decide to change it going forward, but, then again, there's always other anonymous forums somewhere on the web.
Related to this, interesting how things have changed compared to, when was it?, 2012-2014?, i.e. when Google was pushing for the "real identity" stuff for their Google+ users. I remember the backlash from back then, almost none of it has remained.
We need those kinds of assurances to have decent discussions on any site today. I'm not 100% sure if Tumblr has it or how Twitter worked either. But identity is important.
Maybe not the _SPECIFIC_ identity of who you or I am. But enough of an identity to say that you (or I) am not double-making accounts, astroturfing opinions or the like.
Fully anonymous just leads to people building tons of fake accounts. You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving his point and making it look like his point is popular.
A degree of identify verification, to mitigate bots, spammers, mass posters, and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet.