this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts

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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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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I feel like the people I interact with irl don't even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.

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[–] Alloi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

you are 100% correct, however, the longer im here, the more tech literate i become, the easier it becomes for me to explain it to others, and thus, the fediverse grows. word of mouth to those willing to take the plunge.

you cant force people to learn something, but being able to sell it convincingly helps, especially if you know what you are talking about, and arent abbrasive or judgemental.

linux community / privacy communities rock here.

also general conversation feels more honest and constructive. instead of the whole "WeLl AcTuAlLy!" type of shit you get on reddit. it happens, but nowhere nearly as much.

also, way less censorship. comparing feeds from lemmy to reddit, is like apples to oranges.

this feels like a much more human space to me.

[–] enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

in a simplified phrase, fediverse is the linux of social media. I'm not saying this is good or bad.

[–] mobotsar@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago

How has nobody posted the geology XKCD yet?

[–] SethranKada@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago (9 children)

The store I work at mostly hires immigrants. While I would say that the language barrier is squing things a little, my coworkers generally have never handled technology before, even if they were previously in a role that had a high level of education.

Take one of my coworkers for example. When she asked me what I was reading, my fumbled attempt to explain fanfiction might as well have been pure gibrish. She didn't even have a concept of a book that isn't educational, never mind not knowing the translation of "fiction". After explaining the concept, she said "Oh, like the Bible?"

I think I might have done a mental bluescreen at that one.

Even just this last week, she seemed to be genuenly confuzed when I explained that I was writing a book. She kept asking "oh, are you in school then?" as if the only reason to ever write stuff was for school.

Anyways, my point is; the average everyday person has likely never so much as owned a smartphone, never mind knows how to boot off a usb drive. It's not just an immigrant thing either, my familly is almost utterly unable to have conversations with me because they don't even recognize 3/4ths of the words I need to use to describe the concept I need to explain to explain why I was laughing at a meme.

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[–] brown567@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

Nah, I'm an idiot XD

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)
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[–] Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's also why I think people say they don't want lemmy to change, that they want to filter out people, whenever the state of the platform is discussed, how it's not user friendly and properly thought out to be scalable.

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[–] halvar@lemy.lol 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

As someone who is way too tech literate I would argue tech should be made more accessible. I wholeheartedly disagree with the walled garden approach, but the fact that I just had a conversation with my friends with the result of "but I won't use a password manager, because it's too complicated" is very eye opening.

Here's my setup for instance: Bitwarden, I log into my own server (which it self is kind of a hidden setting), then go into Settings > Autofill, check everything, grant a dozen obscure permissions (most people won't know what they are) and then sometimes it just doesn't work. Yet again sometimes it randomly loses said permissions and I have to grant them again, meaning I couldn't even help someone while setting it up, because eventually it might break.

People should be able to download a password manager of their choosing and then grant a "this is a password manager" option, which shouldn't be easily exploitable. Instead apps and websites should clearly declare login forms, but they don't really so these apps need a fuckton of permissions, over which we should obviously have granular control, so fucking password managers of all things become a powertool.

And these kinds of things happen ridiculously often, over way too much different tech stuff.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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[–] pigup@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm currently trying to usb boot an old Motherboard from 2011 that has a very early version of UEFI. Modern disk imagers do fancy partitions that aren't recognized by this ancient artifact. Just saying it can be challenging.

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[–] DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Nah, I'm only partially tech literate. I don't know how in the fuck to use a terminal or command line stuff.

But I know what HTTPS is and how to check the header of an email to know if its phishing. I know how to use and manage PGP keys (although I have zero people to communicate with so I end up never using it, in practice).

Boot from USB is just spamming one of the F1 F2 F11 F12 button repeatedly then select the USB, very easy, learned that in 2 minutes using a web search.

But don't ask me to set up a Lemmy Instance, I aint got the brain power for it, I'm likely to mess up setting up the security aspect of it then a hacker is gonna deface it like lemmy.world that time when they got hacked. I actually have zero clue on how to set up self-host stuff. I don't bother with a NAS, I just copy my photos, videos, movies, wikipedia .zim files via a USB cable directly to a portable SSD (I keep multiple copies of the same files). If I need my files on the go, I just take one of the SSDs and put it in my pocket. No NAS needed.

(Also NAS are kinda expensive, and you have to buy the drives separately, so the NAS thing is kinda just expensive stuff on top of the storage you already have to pay for, so I don't bother, I love my portable SSDs)

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