Like oking through the Lemmy github, its hard to determine what is designed behavior. The devs are on record saying that deleted posts are visible if you have the link, visible but only if logged in, visible but only for mods and admins, deleted permanently.

They refer to the right to be forgotten, but also that comments add value and allowing a poster to effectively delete them is unwanted.

I can’t figure out what is the most recent “as designed” behavior.