This is (unfortunately) not entirely accurate yet. Boosts used to be what constituted upvotes in kbin, and the code base is still catching up. So currently, boosts are used for important things like the kbin sorting mechanism. Soon, upvotes in kbin (AKA favourites) will probably improve visibility all over the threadiverse (Lemmy and kbin), while boosts will be more useless.
An upvote in kbin equals a favourite in Mastodon, which is pretty much a “compliments to the chef” that doesn’t do anything but make the original poster feel happy about themselves. A boost in Mastodon is similar to a retweet in twitter, and since there are no sorting algorithms it’s the main way in which you boost visibility of a post there.
If anyone follows your user from Mastodon or another microblogging service, the posts you boost will show up in their timeline along with your posts.
@Cat @subignition
This is (unfortunately) not entirely accurate yet. Boosts used to be what constituted upvotes in kbin, and the code base is still catching up. So currently, boosts are used for important things like the kbin sorting mechanism. Soon, upvotes in kbin (AKA favourites) will probably improve visibility all over the threadiverse (Lemmy and kbin), while boosts will be more useless.
An upvote in kbin equals a favourite in Mastodon, which is pretty much a “compliments to the chef” that doesn’t do anything but make the original poster feel happy about themselves. A boost in Mastodon is similar to a retweet in twitter, and since there are no sorting algorithms it’s the main way in which you boost visibility of a post there.
If anyone follows your user from Mastodon or another microblogging service, the posts you boost will show up in their timeline along with your posts.