this post was submitted on 01 Mar 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:
- 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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I have a pretty low opinion of moderators generally.
In the vast majority of cases, the people who actually want to be moderators are precisely the worst kinds of people to do the job.
Of course there are exceptions but all too often they're doing it because they like the power and attention.
Sounds like you'd make an excellent moderator!
Because who do you think moderators and admins are? Literally just people trying to look after computer systems for the benefit of everyone who wants to use and support that system.
It is very thankless and unrelenting work. I've done it for decades and right now I'm not doing it at all because it's too exhausting to have as a background thread with the rest of my family life.
If you have a low opinion of mods then seriously, try being one for a few years. It's a hard sell without much good about it. Mods are just people taking turns at a job very few actually want to do.
Volunteer admins and moderators are really why we have any public internet at all.
Yeah that's fair.
Being an administrator is different, you don't volunteer for that task because you like the attention.
I feel this. I used to volunteer for some local groups but don't presently as I have a young family and it's all consuming.
I think many people feel this way, and I think in many cases another thing that plays into it is not realising the amount of good moderators, because good moderation usually doesn't make as much noise as when it's bad.
If I think of all the communities in lemmy/piefed I like, the perfect/near perfect moderation from my browsing heavily outweighs anything problematic.
I remember I was an administrator, and the moderator threatened to ban me. That was fun, I was like "Oh no, please don't". And I just played along.
As an administrator, I had only 2 modes: Not sure, can't ban this person without more evidence, and "that is a liability, shut down the server!". So I didn't react to most things that were done, even if they were technically against the rules. Then when I became the owner, I set a pol for people to decide if I should just delete the server, because I knew I didn't have the time to make sure some truly heinous stuff does not happen.
How do you see overly heavy opinion based moderation if you're never the target of it? You don't. You just see communities that are weirdly same-think. Though I bet you'd just dismiss it as a consequence of the fediverse already self-selecting for a certain type, but that is wrong.
There is bad moderation all over the place, but you don't see it, because many mods/admins prefer to ban and delete than to let the vote system do its job.
That's why I rigorously review the modlog. Unlike Reddit or other social media, there is a public record of everything every mod does.
and what happens when a mod or admin abuses their power? If the answer is only people whine about it, all you have is a minor step in the right direction and not an actual solution.
Lemmy/Piefed is far more resistant to bad actor community capture by a capricious moderator. Instance admins are usually far closer to the day-to-day operations and thus have their pulse on their communities in a way that reddit admins do not. Secondly, the federative nature of it means that any community can be replicated elsewhere.
Make an alternate community on another instance without abusive admins.
By noticing people complaining about it :) Also being aware of certain biases and such, and looking for the existence of posts that would be deleted if the bias was heavy, etc.
Sure, some stuff might fall under the radar or stay for a long time, definitely a thing.
Nah, the complaints get deleted faster than the wrong-think. The point is you aren't given enough to 'notice' when the hammer comes down as it does in many communities here.
That's also why there are mod abuse report comms. There's more than one, too, since some of the originals are on an instance with an abusive admin.
So then why is this still here?
Because this is hardly a contentious discussion or topic, and something doesn't have to be a guarantee to never the less be a trend..?