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 🌻

  • Cralder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    94·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
      27·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Almrond@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 months ago

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

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

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

    • Detective'@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      9·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • Barbarian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      7 months ago

      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.

  • Legend@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    53·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    47·
    7 months ago

    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.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
        29·
        7 months ago

        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.

      • kbal@fedia.io
        5·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.caEnglish
    33·
    7 months ago

    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
  • DieguiTux8623@feddit.itEnglish
    23·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    7 months ago

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

  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      7·
      7 months ago

      How do you store who has voted and what the results of the poll are without storing results on a server? Ultimately it’s just the same sort of data as who upvoted and downvoted what, right?

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 months ago

        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.

          • RobotToaster@mander.xyzEnglish
            4·
            7 months ago

            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.