There was recently some discussion on Feddit.dk surrounding the usage of upvotes and downvotes.
Currently in ActivityPub (the underlying protocol powering the fediverse), Lemmy sends “Like” and “Dislike” activities for upvotes and downvotes. Other threadiverse platforms (PieFed, Mbin and maybe even other non-threadiverse platforms?) do the same.
However, the “Like” and “Dislike” activities are meant for… well, “liking” and “disliking” things. They are not necessarily associated with the action of “vote this thing up so more people see it” or “vote this thing down so less people see it”.
For instance, on Friendica, you can dislike a post and this sends a Dislike activity. From Friendica’s point of view, such a Dislike indicates just that - the user dislikes the content. It doesn’t necessarily mean “this should be shown to less users”, but Lemmy will interpret the Dislike activity like that.
This leads to strange scenarios with posts that a user finds relevant and interesting (something that the user may reasonably want to upvote) but also something that the user dislikes (i.e. downvote).
As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI. The Friendica user’s intent is not to hide the post from other users or make the post be shown to fewer users! They just intend to show their dislike for the topic at hand.
However Lemmy will interpret that Dislike as a downvote, and the post will thus be shown to fewer users and get ranked down in the sorting.
So is Lemmy and co. abusing the Like/Dislike activities? Should the threadiverse instead use a dedicated activity for the acts of “I think this should be shown to more users” and “I think this should be shown to fewer users”? That way, it would not be confused with the Likes and Dislikes from other platforms.
Isn’t that why Mbin has boosting? To separate liking from increasing visibility?
At least that’s how I’ve been using them. Upvote to like, boost to boost.
Boost (if its the same as on Mastodon) is indeed entirely different. It’s an “Announce” activity, which is akin to sharing or “reblogging” the post. This is not treated as an upvote in lemmy as far as I know.
It isn’t currently treated as an upvote by Lemmy, yeah. But Mbin does count boosts to the score of a post when ranking them.
My point I was trying to make was more that I think Mbin tried to address the issue you’re pointing out there. Boosts actually even used to be swapped with likes in the early days of /kbin, and upvotes are still called “favorites” even today. Boosts are also not in any way displayed as retweets on Mbin itself, so I doubt they were intended to be used that way by users. But yeah you’re right on the actual implementation of how they’re federated.
When it comes to actually using them, I do stick to favorites for content I like and boost for promoting stuff I think should be seen by more people, but in most cases I ‘like’ what I want to promote (so I end up using both), and in the rare case where I don’t, I don’t really care that Lemmy isn’t counting my one upvote. I don’t upvote/boost my own content either despite knowing that Lemmy expects a self upvote.