Anonymous Accounts

[trymeouteh]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem?

Unable to "subscribe to communities", save posts, block instances, block communities, etc without having a Lemmy account.

Feature Description

A way to have an "offline account". Which will have the following features

• "Subscribe to communities". Will simply follow the community and not increase the subscriber count of the community
• Save posts in bookmarks
• Label account https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder/issues/1493
• Choose default language(s)
• Choose sort type (Simular to https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder/issues/1487)
• Block instances
• Block communities

However it will not allow you to...

• Subscribe to communities (Have the subscriber count be affected by you following the community)
• Create posts
• Create comments
• Upvote/Downvote

Why not just make another lemmy account?

Privacy. With an "offline account". the communities you follow is offline and not available to the public. Also you can still choose your home instance and some instances do not make signing up for easy.

Syncing Offline Account Data

I would suggest having the app allow the user to choose a directory on their device to store their offline account data. The offline account data for each account can be stored in a JSON file. Thunder app will read/write from this file. The user can use cloud storage syncing apps or apps like Syncthing to sync the JSON files between multiple devices, allowing the user to have a sycned offline account on all of their devices without having to import/export their data every time they follow a new community or add a instance to their block instance list.

Alternative Solutions

None

Additional Context

No response

[micahmo]

Just a note that we did have the ability to subscribe to communities without an account at one point in #364. To be honest I don't use this feature so I'm not sure if it still works.

[trymeouteh]

I did try subscribing with an anonymous account and it will seem the feature is broken/buggy

• I was able to subscribe to the same community twice
• I was unable to subscribe to other communities
• It showed I was subscribed to these communities across all of my anonymous accounts (lemmy.world, programming.dev, lemmy.ml)

[micahmo]

The last point would be expected with the current implementation, but due to some recent under-the-hood changes, we should have the ability to associate anonymous subscriptions with the current anonymous instance. We'll definitely keep this issue open for improving the existing feature!