I notices that also on Reddit (some old page we use to use :) )
Since we are constantly talking about user privacy - why on all platforms you can still go under user account and basically build whole "persona" on that data.
I remember that there was a tool where you put in reddit username and it produced "scary" level of details about person.
So is there only way to just swap account every few months?
If someone was interested enough in you they could probably match your different accounts to one poster.
https://github.com/dllllb/sn-profile-matching
https://www.irjet.net/archives/V5/i3/IRJET-V5I368.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167739X17324809
These are about large user profiles, but I'm pretty certain you can train a model to recognize a user's writing style from only months of posts
These are about matching large profiles, not just months of data.
But I'm pretty certain that you can train a computer to recognize a persons writing style from just months of data.
So is there only way to just swap account every few months?
If you care about orgs having the ability to profile you then yes.
There is not really a way for platfoms to prevent this from happening, even if they wanted to. Unless you go full anonymous ala 4chan etc. (even then it could be done, just harder)
What data do you mean exactly? Lemmy doesn't really require you to give it much data. Do you mean your post history or something?
Yeah - if you think about it - when you meet somebody you don't just dump your whole history on them from when you were 5. You usually have like different "levels" of sharing depending who the person is.
Don't get me wrong, it is not that I have dark secrets but I always found funny where I heard that 1. rule of (sorry) reddit is that you do not share your username :)
Sure, and I get that, but there is really no way to avoid that. If you don't want people to see what you have posted you can choose to just not post. The only other option would be to eliminate user profiles entirely (which has been done by some services before, an example is "Jodel") but that brings a bunch of other issues that turns the website into something completely different. It would just not work for the type of forum reddit, Lemmy and kbin are trying to be.