Yes, that was one of my proposals in OP, to append info about moving to Lemmy at the end of comments, but without removing their original content.
I didn’t and wouldn’t be using the word protest btw, because we are supposedly past that now! We are done with Reddit for good, supposedly! We just want people to know where we moved!
Well, that’s my unpopular opinion 😉
Unlike content in let’s say Facebook, there is a wealth of knowledge in Reddit that is indexed by search engines, covering a plethora of topics. Removing that knowledge will hurt people searching for that info, while hardly affecting Reddit. Erasing all traces of that content removes the opportunity to tell Redditors and visitors alike about what Reddit had done, and where the authors of that useful content had moved.
I already argued this in OP.