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?

But there are no limits or obvious indications that someone edited their post via goat, pds.ls, etc. Not saying these aren’t good ideas, but about as secure as this gate. How would such a loophole be closed or, if useful functionality to retain, show indications of new CIDs in AppViews?

Realistically, this is an AppView concern (based on the way atproto is designed today). I'm pretty confident this is just relevant to Bluesky as an AppView. Other AppViews have to make their own decisions on how to handle it.

Sure, but my point was that perhaps Bluesky should - or maybe they already are thinking about it - show indications of edits if the CID changes. The AppView could still limit “non-techy” edits to 5 minutes and all that to combat abuse, but always show signs of edits.

Fair point. At the very least it would provide some deniability.

Deniability? I don’t follow. Deniability for what? 🤔

If someone abused edits to go from a well-liked “dogs are awesome” to something far more terrible…like “cats are awesome”*. No matter how the post was edited, people could at least deny they liked the latter. *) I kid…mostly…but didn’t want to use something truly terrible even as an example.