I have lots of whistles to blow. Things where if I expose them then the report itself will be instantly attributable to me by insiders who can correlate details. That’s often worth the risks if the corporate baddy who can ID the whistle blower is in a GDPR region (they have to keep it to themselves… cannot doxx in the EU, Brazil, or California, IIUC).
But risk heightens when many such reports are attributable under the same handle. Defensive corps can learn more about their adversary (me) through reports against other shitty corps due to the aggregation under one handle.
So each report should really be under a unique one-time-use handle (or no handle at all). Lemmy nodes have made it increasingly painful to create burner accounts (CAPTCHA, interviews, fussy email domain criteria, waiting for approval followed by denial). It’s understandable that unpaid charitable admins need to resist abusers.
Couldn’t this be solved by allowing anonymous posts? The anonymous post would be untrusted and hidden from normal view. Something like Spamassassin could score it. If the score is favorable enough it could go to a moderation queue where a registered account (not just mods) could vote it up or down if the voting account has a certain reputation level, so that an anonymous msg could then possibly reach a stage of general publication.
It could even be someone up voting their own msg. E.g. if soloActivist is has established a history of civil conduct and thus has a reputation fit for voting, soloActivist could rightfully vote on their own anonymous posts that were submitted when logged-out. The (pseudo)anonymous posts would only be attributable to soloActivist by the admin (I think).
A spammer blasting their firehose of sewage could be mitigated by a tar pit – one msg at a time policy, so you cannot submit an anonymous msg until SA finishes scoring the previous msg. SA could be artificially slowed down as volume increases.
As it stands, I just don’t report a lot of things because it’s not worth the effort that the current design imposes.
Probably, but there’s clearly not a lot of interest at present, and anyone running one such instance would absolutely incur scrutiny nonetheless.
It’d probably be simpler to send the information to a trusted moderator on some specialized community through some dead drop, rather than going through the hassle of making a whole system for throwaway accounts, at that.