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.
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.
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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.
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It should, deleting on Lemmy edits the content to something like “removed”, so it should federate
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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.
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You could make it so there is a checkbox for deleting the edit history, so only the fact that it has been edited remains.
OP’s argument is that people can hide that they have edited. While I’m not against the suggestion, it wouldn’t solve the original problem.
This one actually isn’t so bad. If a person opts out of their edit history being shown, at least this would be a sort of red flag for the reader that should trigger skepticism in the content’s trustworthiness. That being said, it would still be inferior to having a mandatory edit history.
To draw attention to an edit, for example to correct an erroneous statement, use a combination of strikethrough and bold (or italic if more appropriate):
Joe Hill, who wrote songs about union organizing, was framed and
hungexecuted by firing squad by the state of Utah in 1915.Joe Hill, who wrote songs about union organizing, was framed and ~~hung~~ **executed by firing squad** by the state of Utah in 1915.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.