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

some of these are tough tradeoffs. 5 minutes won't catch the typo you spot two hours later. one edit means you can't fix the fix. we know. it's the price of mitigating these risks and keeping people safe here. and this is what might be feasible for our small team.

tell me: - do these limits feel ok? - is 5 minutes acceptable? - why is post editing important to you?

this feels a bit like over-engineering for unknown unknowns. the constraints of a social media platform are known to the community + are part of the social structure. As you drop edits in, people will bait but in 5 years it’ll be a familiar part of the platform and not a useful tool for abuse.

as long as history is preserved + discoverable in-app, I don’t think there needs to be either time limits or edit limits.