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.
Should be minimal since it's text. In fact, a lot of my edits reduce posts since I use it to add an edit that I would've needed to post in multiple sub-threads.
Which further proves that it's not likely to cause many hosting costs.
They already do this with comment history. If you don't want people digging in to your edit history, don't make controversial edits.
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).
First, that remains to be seen. You yourself said 99% of people won't use the feature, and I think it'll turn out much like the grammar police, people calling out others for small mistakes will be shunned. I could even see mods making and enforcing harassment rules related to behavior like that.
Second, if it improves the quality of comments and posts, I don't see that as a bad thing. Perhaps individual communities could disable it, but it should absolutely be enabled for serious communities that cover politics and news.
Then don't give them that power. Just allow them to lock posts and leave a note or a flag to warn users of abuse by the commenter.
Not necessarily. You can pick a client that doesn't implement the feature. Or you can have it be an optional feature, or hide it by default in an expandable menu. It doesn't cause clutter in Wikipedia, so it's not inherently a poor UX choice.
We can bike shed the UX once we agree on the functional requirements, that's how the design process is intended to work.
This is a federated platform, you should assume everything you post is there for good on some instance.
Sure, but they can do it anyway in the clear by sending DMs, changing text of links to look innocent, etc.
I think there should be an option to show edits always, which would catch this issue. So basically you'd be looking at the equivalent of inline git diff (with strikeouts or whatever to show deleted content). That's how I'd prefer to navigate Lemmy, and I'm guessing enough others would as well to catch any attempted abuse.
Then I guess you and I see the platform very differently. I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to "socialize." It's a link aggregator, so I expect the bulk of the discussion to be about the content of links.
That said, there are plenty of casual communities that work more like forums that want to foster casual discussion, not serious discussion. For those, edit history should probably be disabled. So make it an opt-in thing by community so those of us that want it can have it.
If you make a post which is 1000 chars in length, then you edit it to be only 800 chars, the 1000 chars still need to be stored. And federated and everything. That is the actual idea being presented here. It might not be a total of 1000+800=1800 chars because there are clever ways of compressing stuff, but it is still >1000 and certainly >800. And as @fartsparkles also pointed out you need to track meta data for each edit in addition to the text.
Interesting comparison. Wikipedia has a very robust system for tracking changes, because it is a core feature of the project. It is a collection of collaboratively edited documents. Since that's the whole idea of the project, they have rules, software, code, humans, robots, meetings, arguments, computers, etc to manage it because it is really complicated.
Sometimes, it is too much and they just wipe it away https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Selective_deletion
Threadiverse is not a collaboratively edited collection of documents so why introduce that? There is no compelling argument presented.
Also mentioned is git, which like wikipedia is primarily a tool for collaborative editing. It also has the ability to permanently remove: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch Not to mention using git is a very specialized skill primarily attained through formal education and employment.
Both wikimedia and git are known as very complicated to use pieces of software which take years of practice to be good at. Both have their own subcultures. They have to be like this because they are trying to accomplish a complicated task, which is to allow large number of people to collaborate together. I think compare/contrasting these to threadiverse does a great deal to show what actually happens when you need to have changetracking like this and how difficult it is to design properly in such a way that it can be easily used by a common person without significant study.
I didn’t reply after reading the “it’s just text” comment as I didn’t have the time to tackle the long list but I’ll try and add to what you’ve commented as I think you’re at the crux of the issue.
Most solutions to this problem actually store the full version of every text after edit as well as a diff to show what changed. So a 1000 char post with one char modified is 2000 plus whatever the diff is plus the guids plus the timestamps plus whatever else.
Pretty sure that’s what Wikipedia does. They can merge a bunch of older versions together and compress them since there will be loads of repetition. They happily deal with decompression etc since version comparison isn’t widely used by users anyway and they have plenty of money.
There won’t be enough text and versions of Lemmy posts to leverage skip deltas or git-like packfiles.
You won’t want to patch the original post with diffs to produce the latest comment as that’ll just slow everything down.
If Lemmy was enterprise software, sure, have at it with a feature like this but without knowing how often users edit comments, and how many times they edit them, you could end up multiplying your storage costs for no real gain except for a tiny fraction of users who want to see what typo someone corrected.
This is a good point -- I missed that.
What do you mean by this? You can't see comment history currently.
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.
This is a fair point.
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.
I mean user comments on other posts. I can see every comment someone made on lemmy just like I can on Reddit. I see a lot of cases where people do ad hominem attacks based on something someone said in another context (e.g. you post in community X therefore your opinion is invalid).
And yeah, I'm ok with super casual conversations, but we shouldn't design features with only that in mind. Serious conversations benefit a lot more from editing comments, especially if they end up getting linked elsewhere, and if a popular comment gets edited in a sketchy way (e.g. it's a support thread with an organization), that could have very real implications.
yo this isn't the government.
You seem to be wanting a platform on which to conduct official, auditable conversations which are subject to accountability in the form of total mutual surveillance. For some reason pinning these hopes to a random project with a sewer rat for a mascot.
The internet has been going on for like 50 years now, people have been pulling all manner of flame war shenanigans and this has like never been a significant problem. Because if a conversation is being watched by a lot of people, there are always others who saw the original post who can corroborate the change. And if it isn't, who the fuck cares? Like I said to OP, if you are getting into a lot of petty flame wars and feel you need this sort of thing, learn to take a screen shot or use some of the other many client side or 3rd party tools available just for this kind of suspicion. For the most part it is some kind of online urban legend tho. Plenty of people are saying all kinds of stupid bullshit online, no need for others to plot and plan to trick them into doing so. Whoever is looking to find stupid bullshit can find it without resorting to trickery, in any variety they choose.
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.
I'm not saying Lemmy should be some kind of court room stenographer, I'm just saying it's nice to see the original post when someone changes it substantially. This happens fairly often on Reddit, and it's annoying trying to figure out what the responses were referring to unless they happened to quote it. This is especially true in political and news subreddits where someone says something unpopular and edits it, and sometimes that unpopular thing is interesting.
We have precedent here with publicly auditable mod logs, so why not public edit history? My edits are almost exclusively typos with the occasional link update or whatever, and I imagine that's true for the vast majority of users, so I really don't see an issue. We could implement it as a plugin if needed (all edits are federated, so it wouldn't be that hard to build an instance that preserves history), so we should just make it a feature.
I don't think that that would be a bad thing 😉
Yeah, I've had the same issue countless times. Although, it should be noted that a good chunk of those such examples that I have encountered were due to people deleting their comments, which would be out of the scope of this thread.
This is actually a good point. I hadn't thought of 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.
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.