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.
Why not just delete the post, and then make a new one with the correct information?
If this were to be allowed, the edit history would then be pointless.
That is the only information that is provided. One is unable to find out what was changed.
Sure, but then your comment chain doesn’t make sense, or if it’s a post them you lose all the comments.
I disagree, but I do think it invalidates your reason for having an edit history.
I would assume that if there was information that is being redacted, then it would happen very early on in the posts creation – presumably before any comments are even made.
How come? If you can censor the edit history, then you can’t trust the edit history. Perhaps something that could help was if the edit that was redacted should be replaced with an entry that states something like “This edit was redacted.”. In my opinion, this is inferior to having a persistent edit history, but perhaps it’s a potentially functional compromise.
It could be as simple as updating a post with an outcome. You paste in a link and don’t realise until too late that you actually pasted in your personal email address. Do you then have to delete the whole thread and all it’s 1000 comments?
An edit history is helpful for more than just an audit history. Most histories won’t be removed, and you can see what has changed. Not to see if someone is gaslighting you, but just to see changes that no one is trying to hide.
Hm, that’s actually a very good counterexample. I hadn’t considered that.