this post was submitted on 01 Apr 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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The downside of everything being federated is that it's really easy to listen in. Make sure to keep yourself anonymous online!

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[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 58 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I don’t think they really need to run an instance to conduct surveillance on the Fediverse. Maybe it makes things easier, but a lot of this is public anyway. Just because Google isn’t putting a lot of this in search results yet doesn’t mean it can’t be scraped by people who are interested in scraping it.

[–] delusion@lemmy.myserv.one 3 points 1 day ago

Running free instances is a) way easier if you're a government, and b) gives you important moderation control.

Also, a government running an instance that allows and promotes material that is very critical of said government could very well happen. It might sound contradictory, but allows for future control over "problematic" movements, if the need ever occurs.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah but the traffic from scraping other instances is going to get noticed real quickly, whereas a small instance federating with everyone else isn't really suspicious.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 14 points 2 days ago

Doesn't even have to be an instance.
Custom code that runs the pubsub protocol... Without publishing anything.
Everything is open.
Unless instance admins find the ~~pub~~sub instance suspicious and defederate it, at which point it won't be able to receive posts/comments

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago

I bet the Kremlin is sponsoring one at least