And why must I create a new ‘article’ to make a thread and not a post - which I think makes a new microblog.
I’m coming from a Mastodon POV, I run my own instance and have a pretty good idea (I think) about how federation works. The way ActivityPub is used is close enough to be familiar but also… not; very uncanny valley.
Additionally, if upvotes are favourites, what are downvotes? and how are they federated?
I’m boosting this in hopes that it will help someone explain it as well. Presumably it’s similar to the boost/“re-tweet” in Mastodon, but I’m not sure how that manifests in a site designed to mimic reddit.
Yup, boosts are a “I think people should see this button”. @ernest mentioned in a post that boosts bump a post to the top of Active and add points to it being Hot.
So then what does the voting score do?
Upvoting tells the person you are upvoting that you think they are splendid person, who provided good content. It’s the equivalent of a ‘Favourite’ in Mastondon, but doesn’t effect any algorithm, I don’t think
Oh, so boosts are the equivalent of Reddit upvotes.
It would seem. Upvoting things on reddit didn’t rebroadcast the comment to everyone else, but neither did it have zero effect on the algorithm, and it’s interesting to see it decoupled like this.
Only, now I’m super paranoid about ever boosting anything. It used to take a fair bit to make me reblog things even on platforms where that was expected, because I didn’t want to bother anyone with stupid stuff. So I’m probably just never going to touch it for at least a year.