Perhaps unlike you, I have never had a problem understanding why “editable” Tweets will never exist, largely thanks to my conversation with Eugen Rochko about implementing editable posts on Mastodon:
That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.
This, actually, is not the reason I found it easy to understand, though I hope it makes a bit of a sense. It was when Eugen mentioned (unquoted) Twitter's original design around SMS.1 As I noted all those years ago. Delete & Re-Draft - the answer Mastodon integrated natively and third-party social clients have featured for years - makes a lot more sense than straight up "editable Tweets" or the chosen answer at the top of Twitter Blue's feature list, "Undo Tweet."
Here's the full text from its subpage in Twitter's documentation:
Undo Tweet gives you the option to retract a Tweet after you send it, but before it’s visible to others on Twitter. It’s not an edit button, but a chance to preview and revise your Tweet before it’s posted for the world to see. Once the Undo period is over, the Tweet is viewable to your followers and you can either leave it or delete it, like you normally would on Twitter.
- Tapping Undo sends you back to the Tweet composer where you can make changes before posting the Tweet, or deciding not to post at all. You can also select Send now to skip the Undo Tweet option and post your tweet immediately.
- You can turn Undo Tweet settings on for all or some of the different types of Tweets including Original Tweets, Quote Tweets, threads, and replies.
- When active, Undo Tweet displays a countdown of the time left until your default 30-second Tweet Undo period expires, and your Tweet appears on Twitter. Shorten or lengthen the expiration window to 5, 10, 20 or 60 seconds under the Twitter Blue feature settings menu.
- If you turn off Undo Tweet, you won’t see the Undo Tweet prompt.
- Read more about how to adjust the settings of your Undo Tweet feature.
By default, Undo Tweet is turned on for every single post of any kind at 20 seconds' notice. This was my very first change to the default settings (other than the highlight color and app icon): I turned it off for Original Tweets, Replies, and Threads. This makes it tolerable, but still useless, and honestly, I can think of only one instance in which I used it for its intended purpose.
1 ↩