It looks like this was a larger decision from the lemmy development community in an attempt to eliminate karma farming. They say it’s psychologically damaging, and as someone who looks at them a lot, they may be right.
Here’s a GitHub thread discussing it where our Voyager dev weighs in:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3393#issuecomment-1779400639
Voyager could probably add a hidden feature, like long press post count label to switch to karma and compute karma, maybe for last 500 or so posts & comments (10 total requests).
Because it would be a hidden feature requiring manual activation I doubt it would add server load. And being hidden means it also wouldn’t be an issue with karma farming.
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Any terms of use are set by the instance owner, not the Lemmy development team. That’s part of why Lemmy (and federated software in general) is awesome!
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GNU AGPL is a standard open source license, even Voyager uses, and has 0 impact on how you consume a lemmy instance’s API. The GNU AGPL main sticking point is just making sure that if you modify the source code, you have to make that modified source code open source.