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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2025

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  • At first read I see a flaw in the first part of your argument, which is that centralization vs collectivization of economic ownership is not directly indicative of policy, rather it is the percentage of economic output which is used for collective services that dictates the Left/Right spectrum, which indeed is how a Far Left position can be coextant with a market economy and private ownership but with a tax or public stake in economic actors that returns a majority of the “profit” to collective service, it is rather the degree of enforcement of property rights as one of a set of rights and regulations by a central Authority which lies on the Auth/Lib spectrum that dictates the structure of the economic order. This is how for example you could be a Lib/Left Marxist who prefers central planning of the economy, so long as you don’t believe the central planning should be enforced by monopoly of violence and instead implemented by collective consensus, there is no fundamental conflict in the position. Leninism on the other hand implies use of force by a centralized state military/police to restructure the economy along central planned lines, which is an Authoritarian position.

    I agree the “quiz” is very flawed, it would need an order of magnitude more questions to be accurate, and authorship bias is certainly an issue.

    That said, the compass itself I find to be quite accurate to the mental political models of most individuals. What you are pointing to, Centralization vs Distribution, is a relatively new way to concieve of the older Federal vs Local or State vs Community political framework. I would indeed view this as a “third axis” or omission by the two axis compass, as both Authority and Economy can have organization and flow biased towards fewer or more numerous nodes of participation/enforcement. To go back to your Lib Left Marxism, you could say that the Marxism part of that formula calls for a State economic planning model with high collectivization of economic output and low State enforcement of policy. On thing often missing from the Auth/Lib axis description is that reduced State enforcement does not mean reduced enforcement overall, but rather that the enforcement does not rely on the state monopoly on violence, instead directing enforcement through social exchange relying on the individuals applying their independent power onto each other to discourage deviancy from the consensus.

    An easy example of this is in many tribal groups and including pacifist Western religious sects the worst corrective action an individual faces is shunning, which relies on all of the individuals of the community independently choosing to no longer participate socially or economically with the individual being corrected. The decision to do so may be more or less centralized or decentralized (for example a Priarch/Priest might declare shunning in a nonviolent Christian community, while a specific tribal group may only do so through a process of full group consensus, or even the most lib/local of all a spontaneous reaction of each individual against the deviant based on norms.



  • Political Compass Vector

    Because politics is not limited to Left and Right, compressed down to it’s minimum reasonable simplicity it is at least two dimensional. In mass media you see “Left” vs “Right” division, on Lemmy you see Lib Left vs Auth Right vs Center divisions, which are just as strong but largely suppressed by entrenched political interests especially in the US but also across the industrialized world where Lib Left has been suppressed by the capitalist political apparatus.

    Note that most of the time when someone on the Fediverse decries “Liberals” they mean capitalist centrist in the “Neo-Liberal” mode. In some specific circumstances though you might see Auth Left criticizing Lib Left with the term, essentially insulting them by lumping them in with the Centrists. In other cases more in line with mass media you might see any Right position using the term against anyone center or left of center.

    Essentially, Liberal has become a term only meaningful in context, and for that reason largely useless in common discourse. This is why the Political Compass is so useful a tool, situating political positions in their context, though of course it is flawed by being only two dimensional when actual political groups are very much multidimensional.




  • PandaCap is freaking awesome! Pretty much just what I had in mind when I posted previously about a single client to act as inbox for all ActivityPub and RSS/Atom content, only I had imagined it as a browser plugin or full on custom browser so that the content from the inbox would be opened in a client of the user’s preference based on post type.

    Really awesome project! including DeviantArt etc is really great for the art angle.

    The only feature I would miss here vs. other clients is the search function as you mention. I assume that is omitted because it is a lot of work to implement. Have you looked at extending your project with someone else’s code for that function? I know sometimes that is more trouble than help, but it would really take the project to that next level of “completely full featured client”.

    I have looked at wafrn, definitely a cool project and I like that it handles both protocols, but it has some limitations that hold me back from switching to it as my main client. I didn’t know it was using a PDS in that way, do you mean it uses a server side PDS to mirror ATProto content or is it PDS per user?