Post

ok, deep breath… we're discussing *potentially* adding post editing to Bluesky this year.

i know. it's the #1 thing yall have been asking for. it's a Bluesky meme. every time we post something, people reply "edit posts wen?" we see you. we have always seen you. so why haven't we shipped it?

post editing is easy to build, but it adds a bunch of complexity and risk that's hidden until you look below the surface.

there are various safety and spam risks, but the core problem is this: someone writes "puppies are the best 🐶", racks up engagement, then edits it to say something horrible or swaps in a link to a malicious site. now people look like they endorsed it.

this gets especially ugly with reposts and quote posts. plus, post editing adds more complexity and required tooling for our T&S team. so if we do this, we'll need guardrails.

here's what we're thinking: 1) you have 5 minutes to edit a post 2) you can only edit each posts once 3) images and videos can’t be edited 4) a prominent "edited" badge appears on the post 5) version history is visible to everyone 6) your account has to be at least a week old

I feel like a far simpler solution covering 99% of the use value is a "delete and repost" button which deletes my post entirely but pops up a window with a replica of the post so I can edit whatever mistake I made without having to faff around with adding every single image and alttext from scratch.

??? you have to manually re-enter the text, images, alt text *and* any quotes. you also need to make sure you're on the right comment if it's a reply. a button for this definitely doesn't seem like bloat and would save a considerable amount of time/effort

also while, say, Android has the ability to save multiple items in the clipboard, on iOS you can only copy one thing at a time, so if you've got - a link to a quoted post - some alt text and - the actual post text it's at best a struggle to copy and paste everything...

...and at worst you need to rewrite a bunch of stuff

Get a better phone?

Do it instead of the edit button. Specially with a 5 minute edit limit, It's basically the same functionality, without any of the complexity of edit logs and account lifetime checks and timers.

If you have a larger account, you can get hundreds of likes/reskeets/saves in five minutes. If you delete-and-repost, all those people will lose their interaction with the original. You are effectively gaslighting them. "I'm sure I liked that post." "No, you didn't."