My understanding is that favorites are equivalent to twitter likes, and boosts are equivalent to twitter retweets, but on twitter people like way more then they retweet, so why is it different on mastodon?
Iirc it’s due to the way federation works. You can see the real number of boosts but the favourites only show the amount from people who are on the same server as you. It’s not reflective of the real number
So, does this also apply to kbin/lemmy?
If a post from lemmy.world shows up on my kbin feed and it has only 30 likes, but on lemmy.world it has 1k likes, I’ll never get to experience the real “popularity” of a post?
Mastodon has no algorithm, instead the users determine what spreads - so boosting posts is what helps them be shown to more people.
Favoriting a post on Mastodon doesn’t show it to your followers, so it doesn’t contribute to the “algorithm” the way boosting a post does. But it does tell the creator that you liked their content!
Favorites are like a nod but not visible beyond the conversation. Boosts make the post available to every one in your timeline. So if you think it’s fun, funny or worth other peoples time you should boost. I usually reserve favoriting for comments on posts I’ve already boosted.
Because people want that their followers see what theycfound interesting
Usually it appears that way (like I was surprised some posts had 0 likes/favourites), but when I click on the post or go to the original source - it shows a higher number.
I just assumed that instances don’t automatically gather likes as readily as boosts.
