It’s really easy:

1. Log in through your server’s website or web app or any other app
2. Start a new post
3. Click the poll icon, this usually looks like a bar chart 📊 (on some apps there may be no poll icon visible, but you can click the attachment icon and then select poll as an attachment)
4. Write your question in the main part of the post
5. Add up to four responses, and describe each option (you can use emoji too). Some servers running a customised version of Mastodon may allow more than four responses.
6. Set the duration, between 5 minutes and 7 days (some apps only allow a minimum of 30 minutes, but your server’s website allows 5 minutes)
7. Click Publish to post the poll!

Allowing multiple responses on polls

You can optionally allow people to chose more than one response in polls. The exact way you activate this option depends on whether you’re using the website or a particular third party app. (The official apps do not yet support creating multiple response polls.)

1. Log in through your server’s website or the web app or a third party app
2. Create the poll via the web interface as described above, but don’t post it yet
3. On the section below the poll that says “Style: Pick One”, click this and choose “multiple choice” instead if you want to allow multiple responses. Third party apps will have various different ways of allowing multiple responses.

⚠️ Warning about editing polls

You can edit polls the same way you edit posts, just go to ⋯ on the post and select Edit. However, when you edit the poll’s options or change its response type, it will automatically reset the poll’s results back to zero without any warning! (Editing the main text above the poll doesn’t reset it though.)

This behaviour is presumably to prevent abuse of the poll system, but the lack of warning can really catch people out (it certainly caught me out! 😅 ). For those comfortable using Github, there’s an open issue about this here ⧉.

I can’t find the poll button on my app!

Some third party apps have the poll button hidden away under the attachment button. Click attach, and then instead of choosing an image or video or audio file, choose a poll.

Some people have more than four options on their polls! How is this possible?

Mastodon is just one kind of server on the wider Fediverse. This means that many of the accounts you see on your timeline are on servers that have tweaked their Mastodon software to allow additional featured (such as more poll options), or are on totally different kinds of server altogether. You can escape the limits of standard Mastodon servers by moving to a customised Mastodon server or a totally different kind of Fediverse server.

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