Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I’m already questioning the whole system behind it, not just votes.
Say you have critical information that you want to delete but other instances can just ignore this deletion request, than I could technically write a plugin that uses an extra instance, to always display all deleted comments to me, despite me being a regular user.
For other sites you’d need a crawler, catching this information and all this in a rapid fashion to be usable, with a lot of programming extra work.
At this point we can as well remove the option to delete or edit a comment as everyone can host their own, which wouldn’t be possible with proprietary tools.
If someone can simply see votes the same way, we can as well add a mouse hover function that will display the username of whoever upvoted.
While I agree with others that it is perfectly fine for everything to be irrevocable like email is (there’s no real way the system could work otherwise), I do think the Lemmy web UI and popular Lemmy native clients could do a better job making sure users are aware of that. Maybe when writing a comment there could be a little info bar that says “Content posted to Lemmy cannot be permanently deleted. (Learn more)”. And then when you click Delete on something, it could have a similar explanation, adding something like “Deleting this comment will remove it from the feed/thread, but it can still be retrieved from the federated database by any instance administrator. (Learn more)”
I think it is still useful to have a Delete function, or maybe rename it to “Remove” or something, because maybe you realize what you wrote isn’t contributing to the discussion or for some other reason isn’t useful for most people to have in their feed. There’s a difference between deleting data and removing content from the canonical “discussion”, and just because we can’t have the former doesn’t mean there’s no value in the latter. Also, the delete function does have meaningful effects like making it impossible for people to reply to the deleted comment, which can still help with harassment. 99.9% of users will never see that comment again.
I agree that it’s good to have some kind of deletion, even if it’s not really getting rid of the content. Nothing is ever really gone on the internet, but there is value in communicating to others that you meant to retract a comment.