When I look at Mastodon posts, I see a decent amount of replies and boosts for popular posts, but not very many stars (see example image). I assumed a star is the same as a like, but I feel not a lot of people star a post, whereas I did see a lot of hearts/likes on Twitter posts. Are they not equivalent?
In addition to what the others said, there was a „campaign“ a while ago that you should boost and not favorite on Mastodon.
Since there’s no algorithm that promotes liked posts in the timeline, liking something doesn’t do a whole lot.
I never understood this logic.
I’ve been on Mastodon since 2016 and never really got into Twitter. I just don’t understand why the “algorithm” matters. Who cares if people who don’t follow you see your post? I want my followers to see my posts, and then favorites allow me to know that my followers liked what I posted. It’s a nice dopamine boost and helps me feel closer to my community.
A lot of posts I make unboostable as well (followers only). “Promotion” doesn’t really factor much into my use of Mastodon so much as being “social”.
Thanks, I’ll do that instead.
Favorites (likes, stars, whatever) don’t Federate, so the only favorites that your instance shows are the ones it knows about, being the favorites that are local.
When I view that same post from my instance I also see 0 favorites. But when I view it on mastodon.social there are 366.
Favourites absolutey federated. They just follow the same federation rules as everything else: They federated from actor to follower. So, if no one locally is following a remote user that favourites a remote post, that favourite doesn’t get sent to your local server.
O, I see. That makes sense. A bit of a bummer, because having a total number of likes would be more informative (imho) than only seeing the number of your own server.
Yeah, specially because I run my own server just for myself.
Is there a bug report to fix this?
On Masotdon, likes don’t do anything to extend the reach of a post or make it popular in an algorithm like Twitter. It’s literally just a regular like/favorite button, so use it if you want to like/favorite a post.
Edit: also yes, federation as others have said.
As said above, likes are virtually useless. They’re more like “noticeable bookmarks”. Mastodon etiquette is to boost rather than like, if you enjoy a toot, and that’s also how it was when the Twitter timeline was chronological and didn’t include likes, a very long time ago.
Federation, if you go on the server where the toot was made, it has 186 RT and 300+ likes
Thanks, that makes sense. Just to double-check: replies are synced across servers, correct?
Thanks, that makes sense. Just to double-check: replies are synced across servers, correct?
No. You will only see comments by users who have at least 1 follower on your local instance, at least in the official UI/app.
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I know this is an old thread but I don’t see what I consider to be the most correct answer. While it’s true that favorites are not used in the process of surfacing new content, the nature of the content algorithm (or lack there of) means that you may not want to boost posts that you don’t necessarily feel your followers need to see. For example, suppose I enjoy a shitpost but have a relatively professional audience, here is where the favorite comes in. This way you can encourage the OP to continue posting content of that sort without necessarily platforming it on your profile.
