this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
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π§ Finding Communities
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π¬ Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
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- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
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0. See: Rules for Users.
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Lemmy actually tracks karma. It just doesn't show it anywhere.
But as an admin I can dig in the database and see people's karma if I felt like it
Does a user have a separate karma score on each instance, or a total for the whole fediverse?
Well the way it works is I can see the total score of everything my instance knows about. But I only get content created after someone on my instance subscribes to some community - I only get older content if someone interacts with it.
So my instance is about a month old. The Karma score I can see for users of other instances will be the total of everything they've done after about a month ago on communities that at least one person on my instance subscribes to. Possibly some older content that someone happens to have voted or replied to as well in the past month.
But for my own users I should see the full, true karma.
So your instance tracks karma for users on other instances by adding it up one visible post at a time, instead of querying their instances for the total directly?
Does it keep a permanent database with running totals for every user on every federated instance?
Yes essentially. The way federation works is when a user subscribed to a community, the community looks at the server the user is on. If it's one that it hasn't seen before it adds the server to it's federation list.
Every interaction on on each instance is sent to the host instance, who then tells everyone on its federation list. The receiving instance basically only ever listens for updates, it rarely/never ASKS for updates. And karma totals aren't something sent as part of these messages. So when someone votes on something it just increments the karma count at the same time.
Lemmy is built on a generic protocol not really designed to be a Reddit-alike, so some things are workarounds