Spyke
fediverse·FediversebySips'

Would Lemmy Benefit from Implementing Polls?

A popular way of dealing with discussions, and familiar to most people, I assume. As far as I see it, adding a poll system to Lemmy is a good way to enhance user engagement. I'm not really aware if this has been a topic before or not, tried looking it up but didn't see much juice on the topic, so thought I'd spark it up.

Personally would like to see polls, but I'm sure there are people who don't want it too. Let me know your thoughts 🌻

View original on slrpnk.net
lemmy.world

Its a good idea, but how would that work with federation? There is already an issue with the number of upvotes on a post differing between instances. Would polls have the same problem or no?

Edit: now that I think about it, polls are already a thing on Mastodon but I don't know if they have these issues or not.

94
SorteKaninreply
feddit.dk

It would work the exact same way, i.e. every instance would have its own idea of the results, depending on what instances are (de)federated with.

Differences in vote counts among instances is not an issue; it is by design.

27
Almrondreply
lemmy.world

It would be really neat to see the differences between instances that take part in the polls, I think it would work fine.

4

You would just view the poll on the instance you're curious about and it would show the result from its perspective.

2

Very good question, I have no idea how it could be implemented. I guess the question would have to be passed onto the developers of Lemmy. I'm sure they have already thought about it, but as you say probably difficult to implement due to federation.

10

Should be an option to allow/disallow non-instance users to vote. That'd be really useful here in sh.itjust.works for the Agora.

6

I want to see lemmy grow and be a really feature rich platform with no lack in features so yes i would love to see encrypted pm, polls etc.

53
fedia.io

Most of the fediverse already has polls, and can post things to lemmy groups. So yeah it would be nice to be able to see them properly.

48
SorteKaninreply
feddit.dk

Lemmy and other Fediverse applications use the ActivityPub protocol under the hood. The ActivityPub protocol has something called "groups", which Lemmy uses as communities. So groups and communities are the same thing essentially but other software (like Mastodon) calls groups something else and not necessarily communities. But I'm not an expert.

29
warmasterreply
lemmy.world

If it's a community, OK. If it's something else, I definately want to know that too.

5
kbalreply
fedia.io

There's a very long history of calling things like lemmy communities "groups". In my case I'm old and the habit comes from Usenet.

5

I'd like to see that happen, especially if it comes with the following options to restrict the poll:

  • by time
  • by instance
  • by existing users at the time of the poll's creation
  • single choice, multiple choices, ranked choice
34
feddit.it

Personally, I would be in favor of having polls because I frequently involve people in taking decisions.

But my use case is quite peculiar because (1) I need to know people's opinion to take actions based on it, they would not be just informative polls (2) this group of people use Lemmy as their main interaction medium, no other platform is involved.

I've resorted to strawpoll in the past or in having comments with multiple options and relying on the most upvoted comment but these solutions have downsides.

23

Yeah really good app . Shame its not on the fdroid official repo tho .

3
lemmy.ml

I'd welcome polls implementation on Lemmy but maybe this is difficult with federation ? I wouldn't mind instance only polls.

16
hash0772reply
sh.itjust.works

Polls are already available on Mastodon (with federation) without any issues. This could probably be implemented on Lemmy too, without any problems.

19
Microwreply
lemm.ee

Is it a proper Activitypub feature or a Mastodon hack?

5

Either way the point is it is possible and as someone aldready said all we have to do is donate to give devs a little more motivation .

1

I do not want to see polls added unless it's only moderators and admins who can post them. If Lemmy is anything like reddit (it is), the vast majority of them will be useless clutter...people posting polls as "content."

It encourages clicking a button over leaving a reply. We'll get a thousand "Do you think [thing] or [other thing]" posts with very little engagement.

-2
lemmy.world

I'm kind of against this unless people's responses are kept private for real (i.e. not stored on the server). Otherwise it's just more kompromat piling up.

-7

It's better than nothing if you record that account X voted in poll Y without recording how they voted. Just keep count of the # of votes for each option. After the poll closes, delete the list of voters for that poll. It might be possible to do something fancier to get more privacy.

3

Potentially, but any amount of obfuscation opens up the system to abuse.

If you trust the server hosting the community to handle all encryption, it's trivial for the admin to disable.

If you trust the server sending the vote, then it's trivial for a server admin to game the system and send hundreds of votes.

3

If you're the Consort, that's an important part of your endgame scoring! (Stationfall board game 😛)

1
Sips'reply
slrpnk.net

You could just block the communities and instances..?

9

There are communities with a mix of good content and meme spam

-1
nutsackreply
lemmy.world

I have yet to find one. The domain filter trick used to work on Reddit because the images had a different domain name that they would be hosted on. That's not true for Lemmy

0
glimsereply
lemmy.world

Lemmy is not 99% memes. I have most meme communities blocked and I never run out of posts on my feed

6

It's a huge percentage images. Which is what OP specifically mentioned wanting to turn off.

2

"I read what you wrote as a standalone comment instead of as a reply so I ignored all context"

...okay

If the person I replied to was correct in saying that 99% of Lemmy is memes and I have memes blocked, that would mean I am only seeing 1% of posts when I browse. I am saying that if that was true, I would run out of posts quite quickly and that has not been my experience at all. I'd wager it's much closer to 50% memes than 99%

4