We need to talk about content/user ranking standardization.
Upvotes/boosts/reduces need to do SOMETHING, and what they do should be unified across instances.
The best way to use these three scores seems obvious to me, and needs a standard to be established.
I posit a simple standard that can be built upon, and used by all:
Upvotes increase your "reliability" rating. (This can be used to establish trust as a person who commits bytes to a federated server.)
Downvotes decrease that reliability rating. (Admins should be able to use this score to exclude data they're not interested in wasting space for.)
Boosts are reposts to your federated identity (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) for visibility to your subscribers. They are instance-agnostic, as they are more a user function than anything.