Here's a screenshot of my view of the post to illustrate what I was trying to describe. The user you were replying to deleted their comment, which results in the whole comment tree becoming hidden.
I agree there's some other weird stuff going on, too. This morning I received a user report that was days old. I'll let TheDude know.
Left a response in the linked thread, but am copying it here, too:
From my view the original comment has been replaced with "deleted by creator". If a user deletes a comment in Lemmy 0.18.5 then it and all its child comments are removed from public view. Though @AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works will still see their own comment in the comment history section of their user profile. I think that this behavior will change when we upgrade to 0.19x, and non-admin users will see "deleted by creator" as well.
There appears to be something else going on, too. If you view the post from lemmy.ca or literature.cafe (both of which are on Lemmy 0.19.1) the original comment is still there. It's like those instances never got the memo that the comment was deleted. I can only assume this is related to the ongoing federation issues in Lemmy 0.19.x?
From my view the original comment has been replaced with "deleted by creator". If a user deletes a comment in Lemmy 0.18.5 then it and all its child comments are removed from public view. Though @AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works will still see their own comment in the comment history section of their user profile. I think that this behavior will change when we upgrade to 0.19x, and non-admin users will see "deleted by creator" as well.
There appears to be something else going on, too. If you view the post from lemmy.ca or literature.cafe (both of which are on Lemmy 0.19.1) the original comment is still there. It's like those instances never got the memo that the comment was deleted. I can only assume this is related to the ongoing federation issues in Lemmy 0.19.x?
Establish the community rules. Remove posts or comments that violate those rules or otherwise don't belong in the community. Change the community icon and banner if you like. You can also grant moderator status to other users. And you will see any reports that users create for posts and comments in this community.
This community seems pretty chill so there may not be much to do.
It looks like a user deleted their comment, causing the subsequent responses to not be shown. When I view the post from my admin account it's all still visible to me (see the screenshot below). Though if I view the post from a non-admin account then the deleted comment and all its children are not shown.
I agree that this is weird behavior, but I think it's by design. In this case I would prefer that Lemmy show everyone the "deleted by creator" note and keep the rest of the comment chain visible. I am not aware of any server or community settings to change this behavior.
It's interesting that Mastodon instances are trending in the opposite direction of Lemmy instances. Most are staying federated with Threads. I wonder if that's simply indicative of the strong anti-corporate culture on Lemmy, or if there's more to it.
Meta doesn't need to bother with back-channel influence peddling of existing instances. If Meta simply opened its own Lemmy instance it would immediately be the largest Lemmy instance by orders of magnitude.
DeWalt gang, stand up!