No what I was stating is that who the parent of a comment is can impact it as much as who made the comment. Go into a thread where anyone from Lemmy.ml has posted. If you try to look at their upvotes and downvotes it will give you a 404. If you look at the posts of anyone who replies to them it will also give you a 404. However if you see someone who replied to them post in another thread. It can report without a 404 simply because the person from lemmy.ml wasn't in the chain. If they enter anywhere into the chain you will get a 404. The same for any instance that has defederated

Oh wait I see what you're saying now interesting