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.
Editing a post may be to remove the password or email address you accidentally copy pasted in, or removing some potentially doxxing information, or one of many reasons you want that content gone. Github has edit history, but it also allows users to delete revisions so it seems your main concern would not be resolved by this implementation.
And as you point out, there is already a message that says the post was edited and what time.
Overall I don't see that the benefits outweigh the new issues caused.
You could make it so there is a checkbox for deleting the edit history, so only the fact that it has been edited remains.
OP's argument is that people can hide that they have edited. While I'm not against the suggestion, it wouldn't solve the original problem.
This one actually isn't so bad. If a person opts out of their edit history being shown, at least this would be a sort of red flag for the reader that should trigger skepticism in the content's trustworthiness. That being said, it would still be inferior to having a mandatory edit history.