I have some similar concerns, although reddit does hang on to deleted comments and posts for themselves/their monetization and tracking purposes. That’s why those reddit account deletion scripts edit all comments before deletion, and people are (were?) advised to let the edited comments sit for 24 hours before finally deleting them. I don’t know if that actually works anymore to delete the comment from reddit’s servers, though; somebody said they started keeping the pre-edited versions of comments to get around it.

At least with Lemmy you also have the option of hosting your own instance, which I would think could get around some of these concerns? I haven’t looked into it much.

If you post on multiple communities, too, I think your info is spread around multiple servers. And there’s no monetary incentive for people to be trying to track us, except perhaps on instances hosted by companies.

But the only company I know of that currently has an instance (I think) is Mozilla, and since I use Firefox, they’d have a heck of a lot of other options if they wanted to invade my privacy.

Edit: I dislike that when I delete a comment, it just deletes the text and leaves my username there above the deleted comment marker. I can kind of see why it might be desired for accountability purposes, but also, ehhh.