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.
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!
