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

    • aeharding@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      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.