[diggan]

Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms.

Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.

[ttoinou]

Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine

[diggan]

> Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though

For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.

[ghaff]

It depends how much people care even outside of state level actors, how much of a celebrity you are IRL, and how much care you've put into covering your tracks including just not telling people.

These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.