While trying to wrap my head around the concept of the Fediverse, I made this map. How did I do?
HarkMahlberg@kbin.social to 
Fediverse@kbin.social – 4 points – 
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HarkMahlberg@kbin.social to Fediverse@kbin.social – 4 points –
Boost is a repost as far as I know :)
Boost is a repost or retweet on mastodon, and in the microblog sections of kbin.
On thread comments, a boost pushes the top level comments to the top of the stack. It means "this is the shit, everyone's gotta read this first."
On the threads view, a boost pushes a thread up the list but not all the way to the top, so it's practically an upvote.
In all cases, if you have followers, it pushes the threads and microblog posts you boosted into their feed.
I just wish boosting had a confirmation or a way to undo/delete (not sure if the Fediverse/ActivityPub supports this). My itchy Reddit migrant fingers have accidentally boosted several posts just because my monkey brain goes "ooh, large number" at this point :P
The stuff you already boosted have a line under the boost button. You can take your boost back by hitting that again. It doesn't delete it from your followers' feeds obviously but it makes it easier for it to be overtaken by something that's boosted more.
AFAIK, boosts are only used to rank posts on kbin. Lemmy uses upvotes for that.
Boosts are necessary because they re-publish content to the group, and that pushes it out to people who subscribed to the group after the content was originally posted