Btw, I wonder if there are any protocol level suggestions/guarantees about this kind of a thing (edits/deletes/revocations).
The subsub+resub is a nice hack to clean old entries but I think in general it is nice in Feedly that you can subscribe to a feed and get history beyond what is currently on the feed.
To me the author is asking Feedly to make the happy, common case worse to make the rare case where the publisher makes a mistake slightly better. I think the only thing that Feedly could have done better is manually removed the items when the author reached out to customer support. But if I was in the position I don't know if I would have conplied either. If the don't have infra for this it is a risky manual database operation. Plus feed entries are argubly their subscribers data, I would think twice before deleting something from under my subscribers even if I thought that most of them would appreciate it.
For edits you just edit the entry. Most readers won't actually notify the user again but many will update the content.
For deletions there are some proposals for tombstoning. I went into detial here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625712
I get what you're saying, but for something like Feedly, they're an aggregator, not a publisher, and therefore they should, where at all possible, conform to the publisher's intentions.
If I have an RSS feed of my blog, and somehow my pet toucan manages to publish something extolling the virtues of Froot Loop National Socialism, I think deleting that from my feed should percolate out before I get pogromed by Tony the Tiger.
What common case does Feedly’s default behavior prioritize?
But I agree that it would certainly be nice if they offered a way to delete content. For example, an interesting attack on a website would be to silently add spam to their RSS feed knowing it will be stored in RSS aggregators forever. That doesn't seem great.
I remember reading a while ago about movie piracy sites that would store chunks of encrypted video inside images and host these images on services like Google Drive, and then client side download these 'images' in order to reassemble a film. I wonder if a similar thing would be possible with and RSS feed? Feedly seems more than happy to store the entire content of every post I've made!
This blog post mentions a couple: https://oleb.net/blog/2015/11/rss-feed-item-deletions/
I vaguely recall that Microsoft also had some proposed mechanism, but I can no longer find any trace of it. I doubt anything supports it.