There is the same problem on reddit, so they brought it here too so new users won’t be disoriented (/s)

Are you and OP on the same instance? If not, the phantom comment could be from an instance federated with theirs but not yours.

Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.

If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.

Because data synchronisation between instances is quite poor.

This could be due to federation. Maybe they.are federating with servers that you aren’t.

But Reddit also had a lot of this and people always blamed shadowbans.

It’s a distributed system, by its very nature no single universal “truth” exists. That is to say, you can very much see differing counts of ~anything. Or different threads. Or anything, really. There is no way to keep everything consistent, ever.

Is it sync? If any case, this kind of questions are usually better in the app community