When I look at Mastodon posts, I see a decent amount of replies and boosts for popular posts, but not very many stars (see example image). I assumed a star is the same as a like, but I feel not a lot of people star a post, whereas I did see a lot of hearts/likes on Twitter posts. Are they not equivalent?
Federation, if you go on the server where the toot was made, it has 186 RT and 300+ likes
https://mastodon.social/@jeffjarvis/110599267960420875
Thanks, that makes sense. Just to double-check: replies are synced across servers, correct?
No. You will only see comments by users who have at least 1 follower on your local instance, at least in the official UI/app.
Yes they are, just compare the post in your instance, compared to on the instance it was posted!