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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?

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.

i'd honestly be much happier with every old repost/quote preserving the old post, but whenever someone views that post they get a "there's an updated version of this post" they can click on to see the newest version. this, with infinite time to edit, is a lot better to me than a 5 minute window.

0 reposts5 likes

and you could combine both if you want to... only replace reposts/quotes within five minutes, but let the user edit a post regardless. this is also friendlier for appview hosts when they need to bootstrap all the old posts... they won't know for sure if something was edited within five minutes.