I must suck at searching. What is the "Boost" feature in kbin?

Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 0 points – 1 years ago

@Cat It's the equivalent of a retweet (from Mastodon's point of view it is), boosting shares it to your own profile

@subignition thank you! That is exactly what I just found on /r/RedditMigration:

What is the difference between upvotes and boosts?

Up-votes/downvotes on Kbin exactly works like Reddit, but boosts (AKA retweets) are mainly for microblogging. If you use Kbin for microblogging, you are most likely to find boost useful, but if you are using Kbin for content aggregation and discussion like Reddit, you will most likely find upvoting/downvoting the most useful.

Please don't tell anyone I went to the R. it was in the search results of duckduckgo.com

@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.