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:
![](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7829231/257954523-963054d4-21d8-431e-93a6-3f70dfcbc6bc.png)
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.
Sure, this is true for any public website. But at least editing it out is a form of damage control. Being able to edit and federate the change to most servers makes the problem a lot smaller.
If edit history existed and you couldn't remove an entry, the only damage control would be to delete. This is also acceptable but I haven't seen a good argument for keeping the history yet.
It should, deleting on Lemmy edits the content to something like "removed", so it should federate
Not that long ago deleting accounts would crash servers, and admins would have to kill the process. I'm not sure if account deletion is federating now, but deleting an individual post or comment should federate.