Hi everybody,
On ActivityPub (AP) there is currently a thread discussing polls:
https://mastodon.social/@Lautaro_Ferrero/115625081357268012
(it switches to English after few messages), and I think that it's good to
bring that to standard@ to discuss that mater.
We can probably all agree that a poll specification would be a good addition to
XMPP, but it's not as trivial as it may first appear to do it well. In my
opinion we have the following requirements:
- Must work in group chat, notably in MUC including anonymous room and with
e2e encryption
- Must be flexible enough to enable gateways to poll on other protocols. I
notably intend to make a compatibility layer with ActivityPub in the gateway
I'm working on
- Must be used for many use cases, from voting for lunch location, selecting a
date for an event, to various opinion polls (or to vote on XMPP membership ;)
)
- Must support constraints: one vote per JID, vote on single or multi items,
vote public or hidden, result showed in real-time or only after the end of the
poll, etc.
I've been thinking about polls for a while, and my idea was to use a
combination of data form with XEP-0346 (Form Discovery and Publishing) for
public polls and ad-hoc service for complicated constraints.
On AP, Larma raise the very valid concern that we can't use IQ with anonymous
MUC, which exclude ad-hoc or pubsub. He suggested a direct message approach.
We probably need an hybrid approach, with 2 to 3 variant:
- direct message approach, necessary for anonymous MUC
- pubsub based one, probably using XEP-0346, having a service has many
advantages, and pubsub is already present in most servers.
- maybe an ad-hoc approach for complex use cases, something based on XEP-0050
(Ad-Hoc Commands) seems adapted.
John Livingston has already work on this on Prosody for Peertube, using a
dedicated <x-poll> element, you can check it at:
https://livingston.frama.io/peertube-plugin-livechat/technical/polls/
index.html
I'm volunteering to write a protoXEP for that, with John Livingston if he's OK
with that, and anybody else interested.
I'm looking forward for your though on the mater. This can also be discussed
at the summit next month.
Best,
Goffi