When people make a typo, they often think "no problem, i'll just delete the post and write it again". Often this was too much wok for people, so Mastodon introduced a delete and redraft feature to automate the procedure.

This is bad for a few reasons and should never be used to fix a typo.

What people expect when they fix a typo:
- "People won't see that I wrote 'poeple' instead of 'people'"

What actually happens:
- People see the first post and start faving, RTing, replying to it.
- The post gets deleted, favs and RTs are lost
- A new post is created. They see it again and maybe reply again, maybe not
- The conversation is now split into two, one thread without any head (because it got deleted).

Often people do this 3 and more times in a row, but all that will do is show the same post three times in the timeline. Federation is very fast, you don't have tome to 'take back' your post.

Now people will come and suggest "well that's all bad of course, but you could just add an update activity, that would solve everything".

This is not wrong, but it's a huge amount of work. You will have to add the update activity to pretty much all fediverse servers, then add both and update api endpoint and a new update notification type to the mastodon api, then update all clients to support this. Until it's supported, everything would be slightly broken everywhere.

All this to easier fix slight typos.

Now, if you actually wrote a post where half is missing or which doesn't make sense, you can of course delete it. But for a typo or something that is just somewhat unclear, you should never delete and instead reply to your original post with a clarification.

Thank you for listening to my TED talk

cc @diodelass