RIght now lemmy doesn't calculate or display a user's "karma". And many think this a good thing (me included).
Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).
Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.
So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.
I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one's profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.
Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more "public internet resource" than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.
Thoughts?
You could create a license that makes it illegal to process information about the users in that way. Obviously, someone is gonna violate it, but all the respectable instances will at least not, since they usually don't operate out of reach of working jurisdictions.
IMHO as a random user is that, given the nature of the fediverse, that makes more sense to be an option for instance admins. I'm personally more inclined to leave that decision to each user, but I see how the network effects play a role and how someone would want to enforce their decission on their own instances.
Anyway, it's an interesting discussion and I like to try to understand the consquences of each implementation.