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.

There's maybe something I'm not understanding here: Git already exists and explains the patterns of how to store the differences between files. Why can't BlueSky just implement literally get or some alternative to git to show a history of changes?

And then you can implement a cooldown that has a base minimum limit of, let's say, 5 seconds. Then if someone makes too many edits within a period of time, you can scale that cool down up. I know that probably adds a bit of complexity, but that solves all of the problems that you were mentioning.

I feel like a lot of design these days is attempting to solve for every human failure. A good design is one that both solves a problem and educated its users about how it is used. I think showing a diff of changes is important. Anyone can manipulate anything to look a certain way.

Ultimately, even if you limit it to 5 minutes, it would be trivial for me to use the inspector to change the text and claim that someone said things in a certain way. If you don't have post history, how can anyone verify what was said?

If you do have post history, it allows longer term and more edits to be made. You could of course still just limit this to 24 hours or a week. But either way: Having a diff of changes can encourage people to look at the changes themselves and determine whether or not certain people are trustworthy