So let me get this straight… Bob does something no one else does

Straight away you don’t have it straight. Edits happen. The mere possibility of edits in fact encourages authors to produce ½-baked drafts in the 1st place knowing that they can always edit.

edit messages on somewhere no one else goes, adding significant content to something no one sees

Not sure what drives this logic. If no one goes there, the post/comment is unlikely to happen in the 1st place. And with no interaction in the thread, refinements are even less likely. If you don’t have at least two people participating in a thread, there are no notifications to speak of.

and then Bob wants to spam the world about the update with notification?

Bob wants to take no action at all and let a smart system handle notifications as needed. So your attempt to “get this straight” got everything crooked. Furthermore, your proposed solution is moreso aligned with Bob pushing “spam”, as Bob’s new & separate msg forces a notification as the platform has no way of distinguishing an update from a new msg. Thus it would be treated like a new msg and a notice would be sent.

Also, in this context, this wouldn’t be a bug, but rather a feature request

One man’s bug is another man’s feature. Luckily bugs and feature requests are handled in the same venue so it’s a red herring.

a feature that no one is asking for

Certainly not true anymore.

and doesn’t make the software better

One man’s bug is another man’s feature.

except to those that doesn’t follow social norms yet still demands to get into others’ inboxes.

You’ve misunderstood where the demand is coming from. It’s not the author; it’s the recipient. Someone posted a useful reply to Alice, Alice read it, marked it as read, & then Bob made a useful update. Alice did not receive the notice of the update. This “demand” comes from the recipient (Alice), not Bob the author. The update was for the recipient’s benefit not the author’s. It’s purely incidental that Alice discovered that an update happened because #Lemmy was not smart enough to notify me of the update (unlike Mastodon which is quite a bit more mature).

Instead, the appropriate behaviour is to not allow Bob to make edits after sometime (which many softwares have such feature for)

That’d be fair enough, but it would not have helped in this case where the edit happened the same day.

and/or make edit logs visible (also a common feature)

You’re imposing too much manual labor on humans. Machines are here to work for us not the other way around.

such that people who doesn’t follow expected norms

The norms adapt to the software. When the software does an extra service for people, they abandon norms that attempt to compensate for a feature poor system. And rightly so.