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.
How much extra storage and bandwidth would it use? It’s just text. It’s clear that you don’t like the idea, but I don’t find your reasons convincing.
Depends on implementation, usage, and instance activity.
Lemmy instances are all really small and not very active right now but given users keep congregating on a handful of instances, and projecting similar growth from what it is today, it’ll get costly pretty quickly.
My last product I worked on cost €millions per month in AWS costs alone. As you scale out applications like Lemmy, which currently isn’t well architected to scale imo, cost saving will drive disabling of features like this (especially when you’ve got to store a bunch of guids and timestamps for a change that might only be a char or two long - you’ll predominantly have more data managing the change than the changes themselves).
(Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted - it’s an honest question!)