A boost is like a Twitter "retweet", it reposts the content to the booster's personal timeline for people who follow them to see. For example, right now, two people have boosted your question. If you go to "more --> activity" you can see who boosted you, go to their profiles and find your comment "What's the difference between a favorite and a boost?" on their respective profiles under boosts.
(post) upvotes are actually your favourites - https://kbin.social/fav
It's a bodge from when kbin and Lemmy started federating with each other and had to merge their systems. Before that boosts were the kbin upvotes, but they aren't used on Lemmy.
Another important difference is the "reputation score" for each user profile.
Favourites (up arrow) on posts and comments do not contribute in any way to reputation.
Reduce (down arrow) does reduce your reputation by 1 point
Boost (bottom of comments) increases your reputation by 1 point.
I understand the reasoning why the devs separated favourites and boosts but your average user (especially reddit refugees) do not understand this. I think that reputation should also include favourites in the calculation.
I personally use reputation as an indicator that I'm contrbuting in a postive way to a community not really as a winning "fake internet points" thing.
That is most likely unintentional though. Boosts are like retweets, they get posted for your followers and are publicly visible. The reputation system of old was based on either boosting - the post is good so you want to show it to more users - and reducing, hiding and burrowing it. So it wasn't like reddit, it was twitter with downvotes.
I'm fairly sure it will get changed eventually. How exactly, I'm not sure - lemmy doesn't have any reputation at all so it might even get removed entirely.
That's true, it is visible. But this information is public, and anyone who has their own instance also has access to it. The interface is consistent with Mastodon and other platforms where you can view likes and boosts. There are several ways to improve this - completely hide this information in the threads section, hide the activity of users from remote instances, or exclude Lemmy's instances from the activity... but still... It's just covering up one's eyes.
It affects those who don't want their votes visible and for random stranger to track their activities. That's why this is better as an opt in for those who want them and have them be invisible for those who don't want to share it. Think of how you can set your Youtube playlists like favourites to private or unlisted.
I think it is fine, since likes on twitter have been public. People just need to change their habits on upvoting and downvoting that they got used to when they were on reddit. So need to adjust to how people would go and downvote whatever comment they disliked and move on. Now that stuff is public, so maybe it can help against brigading?
I'm more concerned about the more toxic people having access to the names and profiles of people who downvote them. Reddit had a lot of crazies, and it seems like a good tool for targeted harassment. Not to mention, what's stopping them from having alt accounts on different instances and continuing even after they've been blocked or even banned on one account?
That is valid. It's part of why I wanted to make people know about how upvoting and downvoting works so they can be more mindful about how they use it.
Report harassment to admins. This isn't Reddit. On commercial social media, harassment is just "high engagement", and so there's incentives to not immediately remove harasser. That's not true here.
Trust admins to take out the trash. If they don't, find a new instance with an admin who will and don't look back.
Anyone can stand up their own instance, subscribe to remote communities, and start receiving all the data necessary to show those communities. That includes posts, comments, and votes too.
Every instance operator is in control of a database containing all the activity for communities that instance's users are subscribed to. They can do whatever they like with that data. That's a consequence of how federation works.
The protocol as it stands today is also generally vulnerable to any malicious instance. A malicious Lemmy server could emit spam, send out bogus votes, or alter its users' comments after the fact (ahem, spez) and disseminate the modified versions. The main tool that other instances have to deal with a malicious instance is ... yup, defederating.
Ultimately, other federated services in Internet history have adopted different ways to deal with this problem:
IRC doesn't have a single federation; it has many federations ("IRC networks"), and server operators form peering relationships with one another based on mutual trust and agreement to uphold various rules. Occasionally a federation completely blows up — see e.g. the 2021 collapse of the Freenode network due to admin abuse.
Usenet pretty much floundered on spam mitigation because well-behaved servers didn't eject the malicious and ill-maintained ones.
Email has dozens or hundreds of different ways of dealing with bad instances (i.e. mail servers that emit spam), including published blocklists of known offenders' IP addresses.
the information must be public for activitypub to work properly. not exposing it through the UI just means people are less likely to be aware that the information is not private
Kbin dev said it won't fix this as it wouldn't be easy (one user proposed to hide votes for Kbin when posts and comments come from Lemmy): https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/3
The problem here is how Kbin handles the information obtained from Lemmy, I guess one way to solve this could be to block interoperability between Lemmy and Kbin.
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