When I first moved to the Fediverse, I discovered that my comments didn’t actually delete. That is, I used to use the then-new Sync for Lemmy, and every time someone deleted their comment, it would still show the original comment, but flag it as “deleted by creator” or something like that.

I noticed some people got around that by editing their comment to just be a period or something and then deleting it. But I learned early on to be sure of my posts before posting, and not to bother arguing with people online as your comments might come back to haunt you if you were in the wrong. Once it’s posted online, it might as well be permanent. It’s much better to own up to your mistake in the comments than try to delete your comments.

I use Voyager for Lemmy now and I don’t see deleted comments anymore with this app. But I suspect they’re still in the system, recorded for posterity on someone’s instance.