anonium
Don't open
Posted, but only to you
A status or story with its audience narrowed to one contact. It looks like an ordinary public post. It reached exactly one inbox.
Staying safe
One way anonymity actually breaks.
Anonium hides who is writing. It cannot stop someone building a situation where there is only one person you could possibly be. Here's how to spot it before you reply.
Don't open
Handed to you directly
A one-to-one message with the link inside it. Whoever sent it knows in advance that any reply could only have come from you.
Safe to answer
Out in the open
A link in a public bio, story or post. Anyone could be writing, so nobody can be narrowed down. This is what a link is for.
Keep the crowd in the equation
A public link protects the sender by leaving many possible people in view. A private link narrows that crowd.
- If a link arrives in a private message, treat it as not anonymous.
- Ask them to post it publicly instead, then answer from there.
- Anyone you hand your own link to knows they're writing to you.
Why a private link is not an anonymous one
Anonium never tells anyone who sent a message, and it cannot read one. What it cannot do is change who was in the room.
If a link reached exactly one person, then a reply can only have come from that person — no encryption anywhere can undo that. The protection comes from the crowd, not from the cryptography. A link seen by four hundred people keeps four hundred possible senders in view. A link handed to one keeps one.
Why Anonium sometimes mentions this
When a conversation starts from a link that may not have been shared openly, Anonium shows a short note before you write. It is a reminder, not a judgement and not a block — you stay in control of whether to reply, and the message still sends if you choose to.
We deliberately do not publish how that assessment is made. An explanation would work equally well as a guide to avoiding it, and the people it would help most are the ones it exists to catch.
If you think a link was aimed at you
Don't reply from it. Ask the person to post their link somewhere public — a story, a bio, a group — and answer from there instead. If someone is pressing you to use a link they sent privately, that pressure is itself the signal.
And the mirror of it: anyone you hand your own link to directly knows they are writing to you. Post it openly if you want honest answers.
Questions
Anything unclear, or something you think we've got wrong, reaches a person at [email protected].