It’s basically the same thing that happened to Homer Simpson. The original did dumb things but never intended for things to fail or to be evil. Of course it is easier to write cheap gags if you throw all of that out of the window.

I see you are a man of tights

I see you are correct.

I mean I can compress any story you like into 3 sentences making it sound completely silly. Is there a point to make?

Hosting (or simply just using) a crawler takes less resources and skill than hosting Lemmy let alone modify it the way you intend.

Say you have critical information that you want to delete

Then you shouldn’t have uploaded it publicly.

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

The same was always possible with Reddit and was even implemented. Why is this a problem now?

For other sites you’d need a crawler

Only if they don’t have an API.