diaspora_discuss | The Diaspora * debate about editable posts

There's a big brouhaha about whether or not posts on Diaspora * should be editable. Kevin Kleinman's got an excellent discussion on Diasporal (the comments are worth reading also) and Bonnie Nadri brings up some great points on Diaspora including

Bluntly, the manner in which this has happened is very counter-community and somewhat dictatorial; neither of which is very happy making and, of course, none of which lends to the normal process of features and functionality being delivered as contributors wish to code and develop it.

To me this is a no-brainer. I often have typos or formatting glitches in my posts and comments. Even beyond that I often rethink things after making a post, and it's often much better to do updates in place. Sure, there can be situations where the post changes enough that comments don't apply, such as the classic one where I initially post something uncontroersial like "I think genocide is bad" and then after everybody agrees I change it to "I heart Godwin's Law" behind their back. But as long as the "last edited" date is there, people can figure it out -- and bad actors will quickly lose credibility.

Ah well. They've reopened the discussion on Get Satisfaction, so we'll see what happens. It certainly doesn't seem like a smart thing to do when they're trying to raise funding from the community.