Maybe something like taskrabbit? Could pay them to pick it up, then send it through a courier.

Thunder has an option to dim read posts.

I caution mentioning both Matrix, and Element as if they are synonymous – they are not (I’m quite certain that that wasn’t your intent, but the usage of the forward slash could be interpreted as such). It may lead to confusion for newcomers. It would essentially be the same as saying “I recommend ActivityPub/Thunder” to someone who you want to introduce to Lemmy. Matrix is the protocol, and Element is simply a client that interacts with the Matrix protocol.

I personally think that it’s sufficient to recommend Matrix if one is mentioning chat-app alternatives. Of course, nothing is stopping one from also recommending a client, but I don’t believe that it’s entirely necessary.

Almost all countries need to reduce their population.

On the contrary, actually, we need to increase our populations. Assuming that you mean an equal reduction in all demographics, the existence of productive, and hyper-productive people is mostly a game of statistics. A larger population means that more of such people will exist. Such individuals are necessary for pushing humanity forward. A nation with a larger population means a larger natural defence. A larger gloabal population decreases the chances of a mass-extinction event.

it’s stressing the system.

What specific stresses are you referring to? We have no lacking in resources, nor space. Economic activity is proportional to those acting within it.

Are you going to audit all the code you use ? You need to trust some organizations to make the audit. You NEED to trust some entities

While lacking in practicalicy, this is not a new idea. While It is certainly not impossible to have an entity that one can completely trust, I would just argue that such certainty is improbable.

What I’m trying to get at is that one shouldn’t approach this question from an appeal to authority – i.e. Proton is trustworthy, therefore all of their services must be privacy friendly, and secure. The russian proverb “trust but verify” comes to mind.

The issue with email, unless you are comumnicating between two Proton Mail accounts, is that your message will likely be stored on another server which is extremely likely to be unencrypted. The bottom line is that you can never trust the rest of the infrastructure, and you have no control over it. You can end-to-end encrypt using PGP, but this is extremely impractical.

Or, better yet, one should simply not use email for secure communications.

Do you trust Proton?

For starters, such a question is coming at it from the wrong perspective. One should have trust in the software – if such sowtware is, indeed, trustworthy – and not in the entity that created it. If one seeks privacy, then they should be of the mindset that every entity is malevolent.

It matters because American culture currently prefers everyone to have a college degree as opposed to any other type of education. […] If this avenue was cut off then the attitude of the public would change to allow other means of education.

I completely agree that our favoring of, or requiring of post-secondary degrees for employement is an important cultural issue. I don’t agree, however, that the solution is to make the provision of loans illegal – illegalization is rarely anything else than a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. An argument could be made that the government provision of student loans should be stopped (in countries where that occurs e.g. Canada), but I don’t think the solution is to simply make all student loans illegal.

and then yoke them into debt for the rest of their lives.

Hm, that is an assumption. There’s a few issues with that statement. The total cost of one’s loans are directly related to the cost of the post-secondary institution that they decide to attend. There is little reason to go to a very expensive institution. I do understand that some employers are elitist in that they won’t hire anybody outside of an ivy league school, but I would wager that that issue is not very prevalent – the free market should take up the slack. Furthermore, one’s ability to get out of such debt is related to the income that they expect from employment after attaining their degree, as well as their level of monetary responsibility, and savviness. If one decides to blindly go into student debt for studies that will offer little in return, that is one’s own risk to take. You must also not forget that there is no requirement that one must do white-collar work. Trades do not require such degrees, and are just as well-paying, if not better.

What issue are you looking to solve? You state that you believe people are able to seek out, and attain their education independently through resources like the internet. So why would it matter if there are alternatives that cost money which one can pay, and receive loans for?

What is the context behind this post?

What is your rationale for making that statement?

If nothing else, I would recommend Firefox over Brave for the sole reason of the latter being yet another Chromium browser. It would be nice if we could eat away some of the browser marketshare from Google.

From what I understood of their comment on GitHub, it didn’t seem to be that they fundamentally disliked the idea of the feature, but more that they didn’t think that the community would find enough use from it to make its implementation worth it.

If we prioritize discussion above all else, we’ll get more discussion, but the average quality will go down

Not necessarily. One must look at the underlying reason(s) for why people aren’t contributing to discussions. If it is indeed that they have nothing of quality to input, and are then incentivized to do so, then, yes, that will cause a reduction in discussion quality. But what if, instead, users capable of producing high quality content aren’t contributing because they don’t feel that their opinion is welcome in the discussion – that they are afraid of being harassed, or ostracized? If these users begin to contribute more, then the quality would theoretically increase. Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily be that simple in practice, but I would assume that it would have a different effect than the former example.

A lot of low quality discussion isn’t going to attract the type of users that made Reddit great

I am hesitant to agree that Reddit was consistently producing only high quality content 😜 I would argue that the more likely explanation is that there was a flat increase in volume of content being posted, and the people sorting by new had statistically more good content to choose from. Unless, of course, this is what you are referring to.

I think better moderation tools is more important than comment and post edit history

I strongly agree. Not because I personally have any use for better moderation tools, but that appears to be a major, and most likely primary complaint that many people have when they come to Lemmy from other platforms like Reddit.

The root shortcoming is that changing one letter gets the same flag as replacing the whole comment or adding a wall of text.

Fair point.

It’s not something I would care about or ever use.

I think it’s better to look at this not from the perspective of one’s own personal gain, but the benefit that it provides to the site on the whole.

It comes with significant unresolved problems already pointed out

Would you mind stating the exact “unresolved problems” that you are referring to?

it mostly just seems like you want it for reasons of idle curiosity or paranoia.

I believe that the feature’s existence provides the passive benefit of increasing the average quality of posted content.

Most importantly, if a lemmy dev already said no, and you aren’t willing to do the work, then it’s dead

What’s bothersome about that is that the dev didn’t just say that they didn’t want to work on it, they closed it. I completely understand if the dev doesn’t want to work on it personally, but closing it gives one the feeling that future discussion on the topic is not wanted – not to mention that it also greatly reduces its visibility.

opening a thread about it isn’t a helpful way of fixing that.

No, but I wanted to have more discussion that what was had on GitHub. I figured that posting about it here would yield a much larger audience, and, perhaps, less biased opinions.

Wikipedia is aggressively compressed (since you can merge multiple article revisions together and build a decent dictionary to drop the size dramatically).

The example that I provided is uncompressed. Here is a notable excerpt from Wikipedia:

As of May 2015, the current version of the English Wikipedia article / template / redirect text was about 51 GB uncompressed in XML format.

Since I am only talking about the article content, and not any of the extra structure, or linking data, then it should be straightforward to imagine that it is only ~20GB in size.

Being able to go back and fix my comment or add to it, change hyperlinks, etc, is great. Knowing conversations might get derailed to fixate on why I changed something etc is not great.

As was pointed out by @[email protected], this may be self-limiting issue, since this sort of behavior would be quickly condemned by the court of public opinion.

It’s not just about editing out passwords or hiding what is already out there in the federation. Public internet, no taksies-backsies is beyond the point.

However, that seems to be the common counterargument in this comment section.

It’s about facilitating good communication.

Correct, but this is a subjective argument. I am of the opinion that it would improve communication by improving the quality of the post (removing things like “EDIT Grammar”, etc.), and improving one’s trustworthiness in the post’s content.

I’d imagine the nitpicking and derailing will be more prevalent that any other use of the feature.

This is conjecture.

Why do you need to “verify” what a user changed?

This was already outlined in my post. People can change their post’s content through an edit to mislead the reader.

Chilling impact / chilling effect is just a technical term for things that inhibit or discourage behaviours.

Oh, my mistake! Was this the idea that you were intending to convey?

It can take only one or two negative interactions to shut a user up and revert them to lurking. Lemmy needs people talking.

I would honestly argue that the lemmings, themselves, accomplish this already to a far greater degree 😉 – although that could be due to the influx of redditors, I’m not sure.

99% of users won’t use the feature

Which further proves that it’s not likely to cause many hosting costs.

This is a good point – I missed that.

invites users to review people’s edit history

They already do this with comment history.

What do you mean by this? You can’t see comment history currently.

If you don’t want people digging in to your edit history, don’t make controversial edits.

Hm, well, an edit is only controversial if you know that it was edited in a controversial manner. You wouldn’t look in the edit history because you knew that it was controversial, you would look in the edit history and find that it was controversial. Unless, you meant to say “controversial posts” to which I would say that I disagree with that opinion.

People being jerks for calling out typo fixes likely will result in downvotes, thus discouraged by the community. Look at grammar police, they’re frequently downvoted to the point where they’re not very common (though more common than they should be).

This is a fair point.

I see it as a place to discuss news and politics, not a place to “socialize.”

This is a rather one-sided/dubious statement. For one talking about news and politics could be deemed as socializing, plus a forum is just a medium of discourse in the general sense – it doesn’t really have any explicitly defined topic unless stated by an individual communtiy.

What you think adds a feature actually takes away a feature (being able to edit posts without the edit being visible). That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Do note that a feature’s mere existence doesn’t necessitate that it must be a good feature.

Increased hosting costs to operate it (storage)

I don’t believe that this is much of an issue, as text is extremely cheap to store. It would, of course, be false to state that it doesn’t increase the cost at all, but I would argue that the increase in cost is most likely small enough to be of little concern. Let’s make a very basic, and not overly precise example: Say, on average, there is 100 words in each Lemmy post’s body. And say, on average, that a user will edit 10 words. Now, say that the algorithm that generates the changes, only stores the changes relative to the previous content, so we can then simplify this to say that it only stores the text plus, say, maybe 1 extra words worth of data for location, and linking information. So that means that each post will only add on maybe 11 words on average which would equate to a 1.1% increase in text storage requirements. Given that all of Wikipedia’s Engish article text is around 20GB, a 1.1% increase in that is only about 220MB – one should be able to see that the equivelant for Lemmy wouldn’t be that terrible.

Increased API calls and sizes (bandwidth)

I’m not sure that I am qualified enough to make a comment on this, as I am not at all an expert in how Lemmy’s (or ActivityPub’s) Networking works under the hood, but how would this differ from how it already works? You can already make an edit, so the number of API requests should stay somewhat the same. The only thing I can think of is that when someone opens the edit history, they would need to make a few API calls to retrieve it all, unless all that could be retrieved in one call, then it should be the same as displaying the date of the last edit which is a feature that already exists with the only difference being the payload size in that case.

99.999% of feature use is just typo correction

Sure, but I don’t see this as a counterargument. The whole point of it is to be able to verify that it is indeed a typo correction.

99% of users won’t use the feature

True, this could be seen as an investment that may not be worth it as it would really only cater to those who are, perhaps, on the upper end of paranoia, or overly persnickety.

It invites users to review people’s edit history and nitpick/call out things that the poster edited out for a reason…

This is a fair point. I hadn’t considered this. I do think that it wouldn’t be super common, it is indeed a possible issue.

Which in turn breaks down and chills conversation as users have to be overly careful that their comment or post is 100% accurate to avoid getting nitpicked, that they fully agree with what they’re saying as they can’t take it back or edit their stance/opinion in the future, that they don’t reveal anything sensitive by mistake

I mean, it’s kind of already like this, is it not? What you say is certainly under scrutiny by the court of public opinion. Unless you mean that one cannot take something back because it would be ingrained in the edit history, but, to that, I would say that one can still delete their post.

It invites abuse from mods by reverting edits and dictating which “version of truth” of a post is the one that everyone sees rather than the user being in control.

Hm, I think this is a completely separate issue. A mod, or admin should not be able to do such things. This actually brings up a separate idea that I had where, ideally, a post would be signed by the user who wrote it so that one could be certain that it was the user who indeed wrote the post, and that it was not modified by an admin, or some other external entity. This censorship is an existing problem with no solution.

Extra UI cutter is needed to handle the feature

The button that would contain the history already exists in the form of the edit pencil that posts have. Unless you mean the diff itself, but that would only be visible if one toggles it.

If a user posts credentials, they have to delete the entire post or comment and even then, the backend server very well could still have that log saved in a backup (legal ramifications)

Yeah deleting would be the only option – personally, I don’t see this as a huge issue, but that’s just me. As for the logs, they could already exist for a deleted post anyways. When you post something online, there really is 0 guarantee that you can ever remove it. Generally, one must accept that whatever they put online is out there, in some capacity, forever.

Users could abuse the feature to e.g. share links to abuse material and hide it in the log requiring moderators to have to review all messages and all edit histories, greatly increasing their work load, especially if users constantly edit their posts to make moderators jobs harder to sift through all the edits to reveal what they did.

Good point. I hadn’t considered this issue. I would argue that it’s the most important point of your list. I’m not sure that there is anything that could really be done about it. It would essentially have to rely on someone reporting it after having gone through the edit history, or a mod just happening to have gone through the history themself.

will have a direct, chilling impact on all other users.

Aha, you don’t need to use such melodramatic language to try to magnify your opinion – your counterarguments should be enough.

if you need audit logs, you do it behind the scenes not in the UI

Do note that this is supposed to be for the benefit of the user, and not the admins. A user cannot access logs.

Visible changelogs on information chat / social systems make people talk less, not more.

I would like to know your source for such a statement.

And given how Lemmy is still in its infancy and hasn’t reached a critical mass, adding a feature like OP proposed could make Lemmy a far less inviting place to socialise.

This is a purely subjective statement, I would argue.