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.
Would you mind elaborating on why you feel that way?
Thank you for that info! I'll update my post.
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.
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
It wouldn't technically add content (unless you count the peristant old versions as added content), it provides passive improvement to quality.
What portion of that is text, and what portion of that is media?
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.
All of what I had in mind is database, media I have in a separate and cheaper storage.
Would you mind also defining what you meant by "huge"?
~28 GB.
Over what period of time? What's the current rate of increase?
3 months and a bit. No idea about increase rate, I just have a watcher for free space and don't particularly care.
So that's about 100GB/year of text? If so, then that is, indeed, a very large amount of text being generated.
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I don’t see how. People can be assholes with or without editing. And I absolutely disagree that it would make Lemmy less inviting, people being assholes does, not accountability.
I actually disagree with almost every point of your post.
The increased hosting cost is a drop in the bucket unless you expect people to heavily edit posts all the time, I don’t think only 1 in 10,000 edits is more than a typo. It neither invites normal users nor mods to abuse anything, and I don’t see an important feature as clutter.