Currently on Lemmy, when a comment is deleted by its creator, all of the replies to that comment become “hidden”. If I know who replied, and I go to their profile, I can still see the replies. The count of the number of comments indicated next to the post also includes the “hidden” replies. However, the replies to the deleted comment do not appear in the post. On Reddit, if a comment is deleted by its creator, it remains in the post with comment deleted by creator or something like that, and all of the replies to thatcomment remain visible in the post. Is there a way to do this on Lemmy?
But why force that deletion instead of letting people choose if something is outdated/irrelevant/confusing? It doesn’t cause any harm to leave up the information in case it helps.
If a user doesn’t like it, they can just skip threads with deleted comments, or enable that setting themselves (depending on the frontend)