TL;DR: I am terrified of the possibility of being harmed as a result of exposing my (boring) thoughts on the Internet under my real identity. Should I do it anyway?From time to time I get an urge to start some sort of "online public brain dump": Make all my ideas accessible to anyone who may be interested. That would include anything from subjects I've learned to deeply personal things concerning my views on life and society, my mental health issues and so on. (For context, I'm in my mid-20s. I have zero online presence and not much of a social life.)It seems what a lot of privacy-minded people do is keep the personal stuff separated, preferably anonymous, to protect their reputation, career or safety. I'd like to do the opposite, and have everything in the same place. These things are really inseparable in my mind and it just feels so wrong to pretend otherwise. I guess what I really want is to put myself out there, connect with real people in the real world by being friendly but genuine. I want to openly say stupid things not to argue but simply because I actually believe in them, I want to engage in honest discussions, I want to openly retract what I said when I change my mind.But what I've been seeing done to people who are caught making mistakes makes me very afraid of showing that I, too, am human and make mistakes and have wrong opinions. I don't consider myself to have particularly unique ideas, my opinions on most topics aren't controversial and I'm very much against being inflammatory. Still, all I can think of when I'm about to make this idea concrete are horror stories: Being "canceled", fired and kept from getting jobs, sued, doxxed, death-threatened, harrassed to the point of committing suicide... I'm no Snowden or Scott Alexander, but "the Internet never forgets".So, HN, what are your thoughts on this? Do you feel similarly? How "yourself" are you online? Is my fear just paranoia and I should "just do it", or, in the contrary, am I being naïve for wanting to do it?If you've read all this, thanks and sorry for the rambling.