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?

  • Pechente@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • polymerwitch@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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”.

  • alex [they/them]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • archchan@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Kichae@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • TurboTurbo@feddit.nlOP
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      1 year ago

      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.