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?
I think it is because on Mastodon favorites don’t mean much besides showing some appreciation for the post. On the other hand, the Twitter algorithm would make posts with more likes more visible, but not as much as retweeting. So if you want to make a Mastodon post more visible you have to boost it
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
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!
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.
Because people want that their followers see what theycfound interesting