#social 2019-01-05
2019-01-05 UTC
timbl, xmpp-social and andreipmbcn joined the channel
# 
andreipmbcn Is ActivityPub suitable for polls? For instance, could I conveniently send a poll to my outbox and get responses to it from the people who receive it in their inboxes?
# andreipmbcn Likewise for any other kind of interactive post-like content, not just polls; for instance, a post with a button attached that increments a "clicked" counter when clicked.
# rialtate[m] https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Question
# rialtate[m] You're like the 5th person to ask in as many months
# andreipmbcn Thanks, rialtate[m]!
# rialtate[m] > <@irc_andreipmbcn:cybre.space> Thanks, rialtate[m]!
# rialtate[m] Np. What's your implementation called?
# andreipmbcn I haven't built one yet, and am now considering joining an already existing implementation.
# andreipmbcn I'm in the very early stages of building a poll-like app that has predefined answers (such as "strongly agree") using emojis instead of text to save space and make it suitable as a small-sized plugin for websites. I'll look into whether the existing implementations would like to accommodate this sort of feature.
# andreipmbcn Apologies if this is too small-fry for this channel.
# andreipmbcn On a side note, the more I read about activityPub, the more I see its potential for use in plugins like disqus, not just full-scale websites. On first glance, plugins seem more effective at getting the word out than individual websites because they advertise their existence on every website that incorporates them.
# rialtate[m] andreipmbcn: there is also the hegemony of ecosystems like disqus / wordpress to consider
# andreipmbcn I notice that some of the links on activitypub.rocks are dead. One example is https://places.pub/ .
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# andreipmbcn weigh a lot of KB!"
# andreipmbcn Mastodon's github issue thread on polls states the following: "In that case maybe you don't want polls, maybe you want to use Strawpoll... Either that or ActivityPub needs a way to display answer counts without listing individual answers. Tbh, imagine a typical poll on Twitter, it can get thousands of replies. There are hardly any threads with thousands of replies, so this is a unique leap, and a JSON document with thousands of [reply objects] is gonna
# andreipmbcn This was in reply to "Ok sure, we don't have very strong privacy expectations for [polls], but still, why would every server need to know who has voted what?"
# andreipmbcn This points to an issue with polls, in that the ActivityPub standard does not include answer counts. They would greatly facilitate polls.
# nightpool[m] it's easy to include answer counts
# nightpool[m] but the problem is verifying them
# nightpool[m] I'm not exactly sure which issue you're quoting..... answers could be easily represented as a paginated Collection with size indication
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# rialtate[m] Answers can also be sent as IDs reducing size (doesn't make much diff if there is no LDS) and if you care to verify them you can go fetch them
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# rialtate[m] The more I think about it the more it becomes obvious that the existing schema for questions isn't just a little bit dumb and you can't just get creative to make it work. It's a lot dumb.
# rialtate[m] The answers aren't even objects properly so you can't even say "i picked this answer" and anybody can make up their own answers. (aside from the other problems already mentioned)