Kbin upvote vs Lemmy upvvote

I already understood that, for now, the Kbin upvote not really upvote a post/comment and to do so, I need to boost it.

But, how do Lemmy (and possibly other sites from Fediverse) deal with this difference?

For example:
If I boost a Lemmy post in Kbin, it'll count as an upvote on Lemmy? Or do I need to upvote it when it's a cross-post from another Fediverse?
And how does Lemmy understand a boost in post at Kbin?
Also, if someone at Lemmy upvote my post in Kbin, it'll count as an upvote or as a boost?

mack123,

Conceptually Boost and Upvote are intended for different things. That is in my very limited understanding.

Upvote is for the post only, but if you boost then the thing you boosted will be shared with your followers and is on your public feed.

The reputation calc does not look at upvotes at the moment, only boosts. This may change soon as the kbin author changes the site to be a better merge between the mastadon and lemmy concepts.

We are on a brand new developing platform. Things are changing fast, as we kick the tires and take it for a spin. It is both refreshing and exciting.

mizzyc,
mizzyc avatar

Oh, now I see! So the upvote is really an upvote and the only difference is that it doesn't count for reputation, right?

mack123,

That is my understanding yes.

Youthless52,

I tested upvoting in Lemmy and KBin and I do see the upvotes go up and down on both sites.

HeartyBeast,
HeartyBeast avatar

In Mastodon there are ‘likes’ and boosts. The like is the equivalent of an upvote here, as I understand it. A like is just a message to the author that their comment or post is cool. A boost is a message to your followers ’hey guys, you should look at this’

UnshavedYak,

That brings into question what downvotes are, then hah.

VerifiablyMrWonka,
VerifiablyMrWonka avatar

They aren't used in Mastodon. Maybe they are in other platforms (misskey?)

Kichae,

Nope.

And, at the very least, kbin downvotes don't federate. Lemmy's might, but they won't be recognized by other platforms.

NotAPenguin, (edited )

Yes. The reputation calculation just haven't been updated yet.

You should update your post to clarify so the misunderstanding of upvotes not being upvotes doesn't spread more.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

Yes, and no. kbin is a bit in no-man's land somethings like reputation and 'top' sorting use boosts, but and upvote is indeed an upvote and it is quite likely the the reputation and top sorting will be changed at some point.
This is an open issue still being discussed, see my other comment below:
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/88976/Kbin-upvote-vs-Lemmy-upvvote#entry-comment-375345

squawkduck,

kbin author changes the site to be a better merge between the mastadon and lemmy concepts.

I hope the devs from all Fed would mutually agreed on their lingos.

UnshavedYak,

I'm (as a dev experimenting with the fedi) more interested in the features each platform adds to the fedi and ensuring we have consistency. Which is probably included in what you said, i'm just being explicit.

Ie regardless of if it's an upvote or a star, hypothetically it should have a similar effect in all platforms that federate with that value. If it modulates score in an algorithm, it should "mean" the same thing to the fediverse so that it has similar outcomes in all platforms. A silly but extreme example of this failing would be one site upvotes and downvotes meaning opposite things on two implementations - it would be chaos hah.

I hope (but don't yet know until my implementation is further along) that Like and Boost are functionally different. I also hope no ones implementation is conflating them.

Either way interesting times and i'm excited to see where we take it :)

Copio,

This reminds me that a few days ago, while I was on my Mastodon account, I “boosted” a Kbin message that was a reply to a Lemmy post. Just what did my Mastodon boost translated into?

thegreekgeek,
thegreekgeek avatar

Pretty sure it'd boost it on here too, see this comment.

HamSwagwich,
HamSwagwich avatar

It was a divide by zero and you killed us all. Now we are in a different timeline.

https://kbin.social/m/MandelaEffect checking in.

mizzyc,
mizzyc avatar

I'd be afraid that the whole Fediverse exploded trying to translate this between platforms

HamSwagwich,
HamSwagwich avatar

This explanation and suggestions from @poVoq was the absolute best I've seen and I agree with nearly all of it.

The stated rationale for up and down-votes in Lemmy is to crowd-source content curation as an alternative to what other social media platforms do with their algorithms. A secondary goal is to crowd-source a sort of light moderation of comments by partially sorting comments threads after votes. This is similar to how it works in Reddit and HN etc.

While both sounds good on paper, in my experience neither works on Lemmy. I think this is mainly because the number of votes and comments (aka the number of active participants) is just too low on 95% of the posts for it to result in a meaningful content curation signal. But to make it worse, there are some notorious heavy users that abuse the system, which is easy to do as a few down-votes are usually sufficient.

I think the Lemmy devs still hope that at some point there will be sufficient scale for their vote curation system to work, but I started to think that a design that only works at a certain scale is fundamentally flawed in a federated context.

For Kbin I think it is even less likely to work, as the decision to use boosts as upvotes will make people hesitant to up-vote. While I agree that boosts make certain sense to use for this, I also know that people un-follow accounts that do too much boosting as it results in it occupying their entire home-feed. For me a boost is a stronger signal than a star/favorite and thus should be used more seldomly.

However, I still think using boosts as upvotes is not necessarily a bad idea, but it IMHO requires to get away from the up/down vote idea of Lemmy where it is encouraged to vote as much as possible (and even that isn't at a sufficient scale for the idea to work in Lemmy).

My suggestion is to lean into the idea to use boosts as up-votes and very explicitly use the "double-arrow" boost icon where currently the up-vote button is and do away with the down-vote there all together. That will integrate better with the rest of the fediverse and not lead to people being confused that others unfollow them over boost spam. You can still count the number of boosts to do some basic "hot" sorting, but this will work better with small communities that do not have sufficient scale.

You can still add a "dislike" or so button where currently the "comments, favorites, more" buttons are, but that should be an optional thing and not federate, or only federate in the local bubble (a concept of Akkoma for forming closer relations of a small number of instances).

Edit: for comments I would forget about votes all together, as on Lemmy vote abuse is even more common in the comments. Boosting comments out of context is often a bit jarring in the fediverse anyways, so the option to boost them should be probably de-emphasized.

Alexmitter,
Alexmitter avatar

Afaik they switched upvotes from "boost" to "favorite" but did not update the reputation system yet.

Teppic, (edited )
Teppic avatar

Exactly, and "yet" is key.
The issues log still has this open:
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/3
Worth noting both boosts and favourites(upvotes) are inherited from the wider, fediverse and using either is a bit of a fudge which is done to maintain compatibility.
At some point ranking and reputation will be aligned with upvotes, but as you can see from the issues log the best way to do this is still being debated.

Edit: typo.

Alexmitter,
Alexmitter avatar

This is not really about the general problem that comes with how both kbin and lemmy treat upvotes, it is simply so that it was forgotten to change what counts with the reputation and that was already confirmed.

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