Lemmy

Editing a post may be to remove the password or email address you accidentally copy pasted in, or removing some potentially doxxing information, or one of many reasons you want that content gone. Github has edit history, but it also allows users to delete revisions so it seems your main concern would not be resolved by this implementation.

And as you point out, there is already a message that says the post was edited and what time.

Overall I don't see that the benefits outweigh the new issues caused.

Nah, never liked the feature, wouldn't appreciate it here.

Side note, external images can be embedded in markdown like this:

![alt description](https://example.com/cool-image.png)

It's not something I would care about or ever use. It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out, and it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.

Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren't willing to do the work, then it's dead, and opening a thread about it isn't a helpful way of fixing that.

Personally I like the idea of that history simply because I have seen people go back and edit their posts, as a form of trolling by getting into an argument with someone, and then changing their posts to completely obfuscate what the argument was about

I actually don't think it is required to trust people on a forum in the way you suggest.

If I was in what I perceived to be a really high stakes discussion (read: flamewar) where I was worried about this, I would take my own measures to ensure I could "trust" the other parties. I would save my own copies locally. Reddit RES had a button you could add client side for just this kind of petty bullshit. If you really want the feature, implement it in your browser/device.

Really though friend, try to have a bit of a sense of humor and distance from your online posting and interactions with unknown people. If someone is going to such lengths as to edit their post so it looks like you are responding to something else to make you look bad, it is either: a) a boring joke, or b) they are really pathetic and sad trying to sabotage you. Either way, it's not the end of the world. If it sticks in your craw, you can just go edit your comment to say "edit: the comment to which I am replied was substantially edited after I posted so what I said no longer applies". You can either delete what you said, or correct it, or leave it as-is with a caveat.

I really appreciated reddit's ninja-edit window, where you had about three minutes to fix typos and grammatical errors without getting the this-was-edited indicator.

The root shortcoming is that changing one letter gets the same flag as replacing the whole comment or adding a wall of text.