Does not work that way for me. All deletion does is change the content to Deleted by creator/mod/admin.
It does for me. I also checked on the website, not logged in. feddit.de instance
With 0.18.2, 0.18.3 there were changes in the behavior of comment sorting and delete / remove behavior. It is entirely possible that behavior changed, intentional or otherwise.
There is a !test@lemmy.ml community where you could create comments, do some screen shots before and after delete.
I mean there's no way this is intended behavior. Others are confirming as well. You can just delete others' comments along with yours (or at least their appearance in the thread)
I'll say this: a lot of discussion seems to take place on Matrix chat that doesn't make it into GitHub code comments as to why specific changes are made.
It used to be you could see the actual content of deleted comments and it was at the discretion of the client to show or not show them. The newcomers from Reddit (June) seemed to not like that people could read content of deleted comments, so I think changes were made for that reason.
With federation, it really isn't reasonable to expect content copies to all be deleted. So it's a complex issue.
i just tested this here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/2308379
and am seeing the same issue. deleting the root comment removes the entire comment chain. i didn't notice it at first because (i'm assuming) i'm an admin and can see deleted posts/comments, but when I checked it when not logged in the entire comment chain was indeed gone. and once i un-deleted the comment it was back.
i then deleted a non-root comment, and now it behaves even differently, with a link saying "2 more replies" but when you click on it it just spins forever. will check to see if there's already a bug related to this issue and report back.
edit: created an issue here, couldn't find any existing issues: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3886
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