this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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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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-39
Website costs should be part of your internet bill (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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When you pay your water bill, you aren't just paying for the upkeep of the pipes that brought the water to your house – you're also paying for the production of that water. The internet should be no different.

Besides paying a fixed monthly cost to your ISP for the physical connection, there should be a tiny monetary amount – a fraction of a cent – attached to each HTTP request you make, that can go towards covering server costs. Currently sites have no choice but to pay for their upkeep with advertising. Replacing this with direct payments would drastically curtail the data broker and surveillance industry that currently lives off of it.

How server costs would be measured, and whether sites would be allowed to charge a premium on top of that (eliminating paywalls, but also making web browsing a much more price-weary activity) is up for debate.
But currently using the internet is like paying for a car, without paying road tax.

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[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml -3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Lemmy is a charity. As you can probably tell, most of the economy, including the internet, is unable to run on charity, else that would be the dominant funding model

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 2 points 2 days ago

My point is that you seem to be presenting ads as the only other option, but it's not - there are other ways to cover the cost ranging from financing it all yourself to making it subscription-based and everything in between. I don't even necessarily disagree with your core idea but I want to highlight that there are creative ways to go about it rather than just defaulting to ads. As an extreme example, I'm a paying member of a community that's subscription-based but anyone can just message the staff and get a year for free for whatever reason if they don't want to pay, and they can do it again the next year if they want to. They're handing out a crazy amount of free subscriptions but that doesn't matter because there's enough people paying to cover the costs.