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.
It’s a like button.
People overcomplicate this, but this is literally the use-case for it: You are letting a user know that you like their post. Boosts are the button to share a post with your followers. I’m not entirely sure how it’s pointless that you are letting someone know you liked their post, I love getting favourites on my posts on Mastodon, not everything is about virality.
Regarding this, it does do this, but for users of your instance (since as you say, they are not federated). This does have an advantage actually, as the trending posts section of the Explore tab will show you posts that are primarily liked by people on your instance, which means if you’re part of an instance for a specific type of community, you will see more stuff related to your interests rather than “what everyone is liking.”
Officially, as stated in my post, it is not – Mastodon does not want “likes” on the platform.
If this was the actual desired functionality, then why not federate it? The infrastructure already exists, so why not use it? Why make something separate?
I’m not saying that “Likes” in general are pointless, I am specifically saying that the existance of a unique “Favorite” button makes no sense as it’s functionality is already covered by other features.
Why do you need a separate button for this? Is the metadata not already there in the ActivityPub protocol that shows what instance an actual like comes from? If so, just use that information.
Sorry, this doesn’t make sense. Even the link you post in the OP says it’s a like button (literally the first post by Gargron), it just doesn’t federate… I’m also not sure if you’re aware, but all likes federate to the server that the post is on, so the poster will see all likes they receive, it then just doesn’t federate further to everyone else looking at it.
It seems your hang up is that it’s called favourite, and making a bunch of assumptions because of this.
Personally I think they should be renamed likes because of situations like this.