To oversimplify, it’s a metaphor about what it’s like to go through life relying only on your senses and not using reason to question or analyze the deeper meanings behind your surface impressions. The story goes on to discuss a prisoner who escapes the cave and gets a taste of true reality, that prisoner is meant to represent a philosopher. When the escaped prisoner returns and tells the others of what he’s seen, they reject his claims saying how absurd it would be to believe that there’s anything more than just the shadows. I think in this day and age it’s easy to guess what that interaction represents, but Plato had a particular bone to pick about this since his mentor had essentially been executed for questioning various things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave?wprov=sfla1

The default wallpaper looks so much like testicles photographed from below and I can’t unsee it

Haha yeah, good point. I guess I should have specified it would be a good post on this community specifically where people look to find handy tips for using Lemmy effectively. The fact that one of the huge instances where a lot of your search results come from when you’re starting out looking for content has such an aggressive pro-totalitarian moderation strategy is an unexpected, but very useful insight.

Holy crap. This should be it’s own post. Just purged all the “serious” communities I was following on there.

This is definitely a gap on the main community pages, but in the interim, if you click into an actual post it shows the fully qualified community name at the top. At least that’s what I’m seeing.