New users could gain artificial karma that slowly decays over time, pushing them to the top 10% of comments for some time to collect karma. The local votes in a

New users could gain artificial karma that slowly decays over time, pushing them to the top 10% of comments for some time to collect karma. The local votes in a comment thread should also weigh more than the karma a user has, only negative karma would have significant weight. Additionally servers could give users some bonus starting karma for free if they have, for example, a verified phone number and email tied to the account. This can be done privacy sensitive by simply having the home server give a boolean of whether or not that is the case. Just like in mastodon, this would be an honor based system, where if you lie, you might get kicked out of the network.