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.
I’m not saying Lemmy should be some kind of court room stenographer, I’m just saying it’s nice to see the original post when someone changes it substantially. This happens fairly often on Reddit, and it’s annoying trying to figure out what the responses were referring to unless they happened to quote it. This is especially true in political and news subreddits where someone says something unpopular and edits it, and sometimes that unpopular thing is interesting.
We have precedent here with publicly auditable mod logs, so why not public edit history? My edits are almost exclusively typos with the occasional link update or whatever, and I imagine that’s true for the vast majority of users, so I really don’t see an issue. We could implement it as a plugin if needed (all edits are federated, so it wouldn’t be that hard to build an instance that preserves history), so we should just make it a feature.
I don’t think that that would be a bad thing 😉
Yeah, I’ve had the same issue countless times. Although, it should be noted that a good chunk of those such examples that I have encountered were due to people deleting their comments, which would be out of the scope of this thread.
This is actually a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.