Showing the reason you edit a post isn’t dumb, its to give a valid reason so people don’t think you edited to make someones response look bad. Saying its for context, adding a word or whatever just shows you didn’t edit it maliciously.
The whole “edit: thanks for gold and I can’t believe my most upvoted comment was about editing!” can go away for sure though
This sounds like a fun project to be honest. Are there any risks involved by getting bad content through federation that’s out of your control?
Just a week or so ago I read an article about a guy running a tor exit node personally and being held responsible for the traffic