Stay anonymous with masks

Masked is the default everywhere people watch together, so you are already anonymous without setting anything. A mask is a temporary label, not an identity: it has no profile, no follower list, and no way to be followed.

Masks and personas are different things

They are easy to confuse because both are names that are not your real name. The difference is what they carry.

A persona is a lasting pseudonymous identity. It owns its own followers, its own profile, and the receipts you post under it, and none of your personas are publicly linked to each other. Personas covers them properly.

A mask is a surface over whichever seat you are sitting in right now. There is nothing behind it to visit, nothing to subscribe to, and no way for anyone to add it to their friends or their following list. That is a deliberate design choice rather than a gap: a mask that could accumulate followers would slowly become an identity, and the point of a mask is that it is not one.

Where your mask name comes from

The product picks it. Every mask is a friendly adjective paired with an animal, drawn at random from a fixed pool, so you get names like Quiet Otter, Velvet Koala, or Nimble Robin. You cannot choose one, and choosing one would be the wrong feature: a name you picked would follow you around and start doing the work an identity does.

A fresh mask is minted when you arrive on a video and again each time you switch back to Masked from something else. Two sessions of yours therefore carry different names, which is what stops anyone tying your appearances together by the label.

Your own mask is never a secret from you. While you are Masked, the visibility control's explanation reads You appear as Quiet Otter in the line under the row, and the party panel's compact footer strip shows the same text when you rest your pointer on the Masked button. What you see is exactly what everybody else sees.

The three choices

The visibility control is a row of three small buttons: at the bottom of the Watch Along panel on a computer, and on the panel's You card on a phone held upright. Each button explains itself the same way, in the line under the row, or on hover in the party panel's compact footer strip:

• Visible shows the persona you are currently using, with its name and picture. Its description reads "Friends can see it's you". It needs you signed in with a persona to appear as.
• Masked shows your made-up name and a generated face. This is where you start.
• Hidden takes you out of the roster and the watcher count altogether. Its description reads "You don't appear at all".

You can move between them at any time, and moving back to Masked draws a new mask rather than restoring the old one.

Whichever you pick applies to everyone who opens the video, including people who are not signed in. They see the row of watchers above the video the way you do, so a mask reaches them as your mask and a Visible persona reaches them as that persona. One detail differs: if your persona's picture is one you uploaded, signed-out visitors see your initial instead of the picture, because the address of an uploaded picture says whose account it came from. What they cannot do is act on anyone: the faces are not tappable until you sign in.

Unmasking, and what it hands over

Switching from Masked to Visible does one thing: it puts the persona you are currently using in front of everyone in the room, and that persona is followable like any other. People in the party get a Follow on your row rather than an Ask to follow, and pressing it follows that one persona.

It does not reveal your account, your email, your other personas, or anything you did while you were masked. The mask does not become searchable and no record joins it to the persona in anyone's view.

Somebody asking to follow a mask

A mask cannot be followed, so the ask goes somewhere else. Pressing Ask to follow on a masked row files a request that only the person behind the mask can read. The server does the resolving, so the asker never learns who they asked.

Two things follow from that, and both are on purpose:

• You answer with a persona. Accepting asks which of your personas they will end up following, and only that persona is revealed. The rest of your account stays where it was.
• Declining says nothing. The asker is not told. Their button reads Request sent and never changes, because a decline anyone can detect is a decline that costs the person declining something.

Follow requests walks the whole exchange, including blocking and the 30-day expiry.

One honest limit of Hidden

Hidden keeps you out of what people can see: the Watching now list does not carry you, and the panel's header count does not include you.

It does not hide the fact that a seat is taken. A Hidden rider still moves the line counting the people in the party, is still part of the arrival announcement a screen reader hears, and still reaches the host's notification bell under their mask name. Everyone in the party sees your row in the Everyone in the party list too, marked Hidden and carrying no name, no mask face and no picture. Those signals track who is in the party rather than who chose to be shown, and See when someone joins your watch party states the same caveat from the host's side.

Switching to Hidden clears your seat: the name and picture it was carrying are replaced with a fresh mask as the switch lands, so a party you joined as yourself stops showing that name anywhere a member looks now. Messages you already sent keep the name and picture they were sent under. A watch party transcript is a record of what was said at the time, so hiding changes how you appear from here on rather than rewriting what is already in the chat.

If you want to watch a video with nobody knowing at all, watch it without joining the party.

What's next

• Follow requests covers asking, accepting with a persona, and blocking.
• Personas covers the identities on the other side of the line.

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