Fediverse

My point is you can have a mixed system. For example:

• server stores list of "special interest" users (followed users, WoT, mods, etc)
• server stores who voted for what (already does)
• client updates the server's list of "special interest" users with WoT data
• when retrieving metadata about a post, you'd get:
  • total votes
  • votes from "special interest" users
  • total votes from your instance

That's not a ton of data, and the "special interest" users wouldn't need to be synchronized to any other instance. The client would store the WoT data and update the server as needed (this way the server doesn't need any transitive logic, the client handles it).

Facebook and Twitter have always had their equivalent of upvotes be public.