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 would this be a bad thing? People should be responsible for what they say.
No, not always, and, even if they do, there is no guarantee that they would speak up -- don't forget that the majority of Lemmings are lurkers.
It's really not -- I have seen plenty of examples of it. I don't have any links at hand, but the most recent example that I can think of is when Reddit made its API changes, and, out of protest, some Redditors edited all of their comments to either destroy the usefulness of the thread, or mislead. Whether this protest was justified, or not is a separate issue, but the fact of the matter remains that it is an issue.