The most common answer I see is something along the lines of “it’s the equivalent of liking a post on twitter”. It seems that this is not the case, as the Mastodon devs seem rather adamant that they don’t want “likes” in Mastodon. Perhaps it’s a method of saving posts? Well, that doesn’t make sense either, since there is already the ability to “Bookmark” a post to save it.
It really just seems like a “Favorite” is just a bookmark that tells the poster, and the public that you bookmarked the post. And even if this was the reasoning – which is baffling enough as it is – it wouldn’t make sense since the whole point of boosting something is to tell the public that you like a post.
It really seems like the “Favorite” button has no actual unique purpose. In my honest opinion, Mastodon should just federate “Likes” like normal, and be done with it.
While I do completely agree with your point, the issue that I was pointing out in the post is that I’m not entirely sure what, exactly, the favorite button is supposed to accomplish – it seems to already have its functionality covered by other features.
Yeah, from what I’m reading over the git discussion it seems that the favorites are something like a private like verses a public counted vote. If I’m understanding it right it’s similar to when people on a lot of corporate chat like MS teams use a ‘thumbs up’ as kind of an all purpose aknowledgement/approval without actually responding.