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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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