On the flip side, keeping your personal online footprint small is definitely more secure.
Maybe we need a soft kill switch to disassociate content with an account after x amount of time. Like for me personally, I’ve put zero effort into mopping up old content, and as often as I post, I’m sure someone with the desire could put the pieces together and dox me.
I’ve left it up anyway cuz I don’t want to do to Lemmy what you’re concerned about, but if I could nuke all my content older than a few months into an anonymous version, I’d be all for that. Leave the info up for anyone who might benefit from it, but scrub my username.
That said, for community building sake, I’d hate to see posts go anonymous right out the gate like some 4chan shit; and posts should be associated with an account at least long enough for mods to have a reasonable amount of time to take action against an account that breaks the rules. But again, posts that are months old? The conversation there is over - my personal involvement is moot at that point, it’s just data now.
I don’t think there would be any way to protect from that, but you’d have the same issue with full deletion.