this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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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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This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it's starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I've yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn't need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn't even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won't be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I'm not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That's been true since long before the Internet.
*Cough
Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?
I'm not sure about all of them, but for Google, you can't create a new account without a valid phone number for SMS verification. If you created your account a long time ago then you're kind of grandfathered in and don't need to add a phone. They don't allow known VOIP numbers (including Google Voice) and I think you cannot use the same number for lots of accounts.
This might vary by country. My experience is with the US version of gmail.
Hm I have made at least 3 gmail addresses and didn't have to do this. And in fact their apps support account switching pretty easily, which seems to indicate that they don't really disapprove of making multiple accounts.
In fact the only thing they asked for was a backup email address in case you get locked out or they need to send security alerts, and that was optional.
Interesting. I had to make a new account just a couple weeks ago (for Android testing as part of my job) and there was no option to continue without SMS verification. Couldn't use a landline, couldn't use VOIP, couldn't fall back to email verification or anything else.
One of my coworkers was unable to use their cell phone number because Google said it was already in use. But it let me use the same number I have associated with my personal account, so go figure.
Interesting, could be because it's something you've had to do often enough that they're trying to rate limit you