Curious about thoughts on boosting and favoriting here. I’ve only used Mastodon for about a year, and mostly lurk on a personal but also have a business account that posts daily. Maybe you have advice for me or ideas to improve things.
Issue: I feel that these features aren’t being fully utilized, or need some tweaking. Since favoriting doesn’t seem to amplify a post in any way, most people boost things they like, right? This causes a few things:
- My timeline is mostly full of accounts that I don’t follow. One person can boost 30 things in a row and that’s what I get to scroll through, since everything is chronological. Then I get the person who boosted 30 things just before them.
- When I check out someone’s profile, I often can’t even find something they’ve posted themselves. I just scroll through boosted content. If they do post, it's often lost among the boosts when I'm searching.
- Favoriting posts is used far less than boosting, and I almost feel rude if I’m the only favorite on a post that has 100+ boosts.
Ideas: My ideas for possible resolutions mostly focus around filtering through boosts or making favoriting more appealing:
- Have a tab/area where you can see what your followed accounts have been favoriting (Instagram used to have something like this I think?).
- Have a profile tab that shows a user's favorites (twitter does this).
- Have a profile tab that shows only a user's personal posts (similar to the media tab, but for their text posts).
- Have a tab/area where you can filter out boosts from your timeline.