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 🌻
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.
Depends entirely on how it's implemented. But almost certainly yes
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.
It would be really neat to see the differences between instances that take part in the polls, I think it would work fine.
You would just view the poll on the instance you're curious about and it would show the result from its perspective.
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.
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.
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[x] Maybe
I don't knooow
Can you repeat the question
You're not the boss of me now!
/c/commentswithsound@lemmy.world
Shit, it might be time for a MitM rewatch to see if it’s still aged like a fine wine.
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.
What's a Lemmy group?
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.
Thanks for clearing that up!
If it's a community, OK. If it's something else, I definately want to know that too.
It's a community
That was exactly my thought when asking. But it seems it's the former.
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.
My first exposure to that interchangable use in the Lemmy lexicon. Now I Know!
If we want polls we must join-lemmy.org/donate
I'd like to see that happen, especially if it comes with the following options to restrict the poll:
Yes. I think it would be helpful.
I'd welcome polls implementation on Lemmy but maybe this is difficult with federation ? I wouldn't mind instance only polls.
Let’s take a poll and find out!
You could open an RFC to begin more formal discussion
Looks like it might be cool to have.
Sure? Maybe also small Wikis for some communities.
Open polls are one of the few good things about Facebook.
[x] Blurgenfurl
Why is Javascript on Twitter?
This wasn't taken from Twitter.
That was a lame joke about the check mark. 😔
Oh, that was a bit difficult to catch hehe 🙃
You mean 'Benefit from', here, right?
yeah.. not my mother tongue sorry.
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.
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.
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?
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.
One way encryption, same way passwords are stored.
Would that work to obfuscate up/downvotes in general?
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.
If you're the Consort, that's an important part of your endgame scoring! (Stationfall board game 😛)
can filter out image posts please i hate memes
You could just block the communities and instances..?
There are communities with a mix of good content and meme spam
Some clients let you do that
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
I'm using Summit, it can toggle off links, texts, pictures, and video posts
holy shitnuts my man than you
So you hate 99% of Lemmy then. Maybe stop using it?
Lemmy is not 99% memes. I have most meme communities blocked and I never run out of posts on my feed
It's a huge percentage images. Which is what OP specifically mentioned wanting to turn off.
"I blocked all the memes and now there's no memes"
...okay
"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%