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.

  • Kalcifer@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    99% of users won’t use the feature

    Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.

    This is a good point – I missed that.

    invites users to review people’s edit history

    They already do this with comment history.

    What do you mean by this? You can’t see comment history currently.

    If you don’t want people digging in to your edit history, don’t make controversial edits.

    Hm, well, an edit is only controversial if you know that it was edited in a controversial manner. You wouldn’t look in the edit history because you knew that it was controversial, you would look in the edit history and find that it was controversial. Unless, you meant to say “controversial posts” to which I would say that I disagree with that opinion.

    People being jerks for calling out typo fixes likely will result in downvotes, thus discouraged by the community. Look at grammar police, they’re frequently downvoted to the point where they’re not very common (though more common than they should be).

    This is a fair point.

    I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to “socialize.”

    This is a rather one-sided/dubious statement. For one talking about news and politics could be deemed as socializing, plus a forum is just a medium of discourse in the general sense – it doesn’t really have any explicitly defined topic unless stated by an individual communtiy.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      99% of users won’t use the feature

      Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.

      This is a good point – I missed that.

      That is a nonsense. If no people use the feature but it’s there, it still costs you the storage of every edit anyone ever made.

      • Kalcifer@lemm.eeOPEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        It depends what was exactly meant by the original comment. If it was that 99% of users wont edit their comments, then yes it won’t add much extra hosting cost, but if was that 99% of people won’t access it, then you are right in that it makes no difference.