I believe that the addition of an edit history would be a massive boon to the usefulness of Lemmy on the whole. A common problem with forums is the relatively low level of trust that users can have in another’s content. When one has the ability to edit their posts, and comments this invites the possibility of misleading the reader – for example, one can create a comment, then, after gaining likes, and comments, reword the comment to either destroy the usefulness of the thread on the whole, or mislead a future reader. The addition of an edit history would solve this issue.

Lemmy already tracks that a post was edited (I point your attention to the little pencil icon that you see in a posts header in the browser version of the lemmy-ui). What I am describing is the expansion of this feature. The format that I have envisioned is something very similar to what Element does. For example:

What this image is depicting is a visual of what parts of the post were changed at the time that it was edited, and a complete history of every edit made to the post – sort of like a “git diff”.

I would love to hear the feedback of all Lemmings on this idea for a feature – concerns, suggestions, praise, criticisms, or anything else!


This post is the result of the current (2023-10-03T07:37Z) status of this GitHub post. It was closed by a maintainer/dev of the Lemmy repo. I personally don’t think that the issue got enough attention, or input, so I am posting it here in an attempt to open it up to a potentially wider audience.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Considering that, especially with federation, editing or deleting stuff doesn’t really make the old version go away, I personally think the better move would be to pull a Slashdot and just not have the ability to edit or delete at all to begin with. That way, it makes it clearer what is inherently true: that once you post something, it’s out there for good.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      1 year ago

      I disagree, I like editing comments to fix typos, add links, or lift up responses I’ve made to popular posts so I don’t have to repeat myself in a half dozen sub-threads.

      We should just make edits create a new post links to the previous one and clients can offer a diff feature.

    • density@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      disagree because for example

      • reading sequentially posted items when the original author wishes to correct themselves is really annoying

      • there are reasons other than personal embarrassment someone would want to correct something they’d said. like if you give advice but later realize the advice could be dangerous for a group of people you hadn’t considered