Lemmy

I haven't seen a database yet (Thinking of spinning up my own...) but I'd imagine it's actually that your vote history is saved on the instance of the thing you voted on. So if you are from shitjustworks and upvote a post in a community in LemmyWorld, I'd imagine LemmyWorld's database says upvote from user xyz@shitjustworks on post/comment abc.

This is my educated guess on how it works. I could be wrong, but keeping a users upvotes saved on the users local instance would be pretty impractical. I think it's more aptly that an admin can see who upvoted things on their instance but can't see everything their user's have upvoted and everything that visitors have upvoted in their lifetime. Just their interaction with their particular communities. I imagine (Again, if I'm right) that's why there's no total karma for a user because keeping track of that would be a pain in the ass.