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.
Making it hidden would definitely cut down on the number of calls, but it may still violate the terms of api access since it seems the central leadership thinks this data is harmful to end users.
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!
Not exactly true. There are definitely terms and conditions that must be followed by instance owners.
They are outlined here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/LICENSE
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.