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.

  • KalciferOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s not something I would care about or ever use.

    I think it’s better to look at this not from the perspective of one’s own personal gain, but the benefit that it provides to the site on the whole.

    It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out

    Would you mind stating the exact “unresolved problems” that you are referring to?

    it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.

    I believe that the feature’s existence provides the passive benefit of increasing the average quality of posted content.

    Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead

    What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.

    opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.

    No, but I wanted to have more discussion that what was had on GitHub. I figured that posting about it here would yield a much larger audience, and, perhaps, less biased opinions.

    • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.

      This is the part where you should recognize that its not a feature they want on lemmy. It doesn’t need “more visability”, it’s their project, and they get to choose what they want to do with it. We just use it as a byproduct of it being free and open.

      • KalciferOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        From what I understood of their comment on GitHub, it didn’t seem to be that they fundamentally disliked the idea of the feature, but more that they didn’t think that the community would find enough use from it to make its implementation worth it.