this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
254 points (78.7% liked)
Fediverse
43327 readers
871 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's because adding a 2nd axis does almost nothing to mitigate how insanely reductionist political spectrums are. People are not that simple x1,000,000,000.
Nothing wrong with building models with limitations but one cannot test the political compass to measure how reliable it is at predicting future results.
As such I genuinely think the frustration you're experiencing is because the people who relate to it the most tend to view people over simplistically, usually because they can't empathize with any human experience that isn't theirs. Aka conservatives.
Like me as a progressive can empathize with my conservative family that's never been exposed to trans people and only fed anti-trans bs. But flip the script and they cannot fathom why I don't go to church or vote conservative like a good christian. I know because they've told me.
In 1d about 2/3 of the political spectrum is being called the same thing. Elevating political discourse to where we are not calling tankies and social libertarians the same thing seems like more than "almost nothing" to me.
The people who do that don't give a fuck about the difference and never will.
The fact that you point to that as the schism further evidences me that the political compass inherently confines ones thinking.