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.eeOP
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    1 year ago

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

    Would you mind elaborating on why you feel that way?

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

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

    Thank you for that info! I’ll update my post.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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      1 year ago

      It adds nothing to the discussion. Use cases where it would have been useful I can count with my fingers. I made many more edits due to typos and brain-farts (that made the sentence look like I just learned English yesterday) than that.

      Edit: Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge. No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.

      • density@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        also some people did learn english (or whatever language is being used) yesterday and they might notice something confusing about their post after creating it… why let it persist

      • Kalcifer@lemm.eeOP
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        1 year ago

        It adds nothing to the discussion.

        It wouldn’t technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.

        Also, I’m hosting my own instance (for others as well) and the (unoptimized) storage use is already huge.

        What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?

        No need to pay for something I don’t really care about.

        Do note that, presumably, were this feature to be implemented, it would likely be able to be disabled on the side of the instance – meaning that your instance wouldn’t store any of the edits itself.