this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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1274 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Relevant xkcd: Average familiarity
You severly overestimate the average persons tech literacy even when you try to correct for it. Booting from USB is already a really advanced topic.
Though creating a lemmy account is not that complex. Typically all you have to do is fill out a form on the websiten instructions included. The problem there is not the tech literacyn but the willingness of the people to even interact with systems they don't know, like finding a home instance or understanding the concept of the fediverse. Most people could create a lemmy account, though also most people wouldn't.
Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.
Compare this:
with:
Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.
Hyperbole? Not really. You described my lemmy experience perfectly. However, not having big data sift through my digital feces to find the peanut, makes it worth the effort.
Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.
While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don't), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.
The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.