cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26769543
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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I'd argue that one of the main issues with the Fediverse is mostly just that interaction counts don't federate properly. Mastodon made some good steps there recently, but it's still not there Fediverse-wide.
My Lemmy client, for instance, says this post only has 12 comments and 71 upvotes, but if you look at it on the instance it was posted on, it's actually much more. This, of course, makes the Fediverse appear to be much less popular than it actually is. Which scares away new users immensely.
That's likely an Mbin issue. Ernst, the creator of the original product Kbin before it got forked and taken over as Mbin, made a confusing decision to have both upvotes and boosts together, and not just on the microblog (Mastodon) side with magazines but even side-by-side also on the Threadiverse with communities. So when you press the "upvote"... I forget which action even occurs - upvoting vs. boosting. Sorting by votes also gets very wonky.
And yes, all those weird design decisions very much scare people away from Mbin: the largest Mbin instance has only <500 active accounts and all Mbin instances combined have mere hundreds of users. For comparison, the flagship PieFed instance has >1k users, the NSFW one has twice that, and Lemmy.world alone has >13k!!!
Honestly I have no idea how all this works, it seems very confusing. But luckily I don't need to understand it to use it lol. I just picked the Australia zone because I live there
It is suppose to be ranked by upvotes.
But which upvote type - boosts or votes? Why do boosts exist at all then, if they don't "boost" anything? I thought I remembered (granted it's been a couple of years since I migrated from Reddit to kbin.social) that it was boosts, and it was upvotes that existed but were irrelevant? (If so, but not anymore, then how and why was that changed?)
Not that you need to answer every one of these - I'm just sharing my confusion, which many people seem to also share.
Upvotes are what lemmy posts are supposed to be ranked by, posts with more upvotes are ranked on the trending pages. While boosts like on Mastodon are for federation, boosting a post pushes it from one instance/network to other instances/networks -- if the booster is one another instance/network.
Thank you for the explanation. That seems all the more confusing then to see boosts done for threaded posts in communities, like is that even comparable to microblog emissions or whatever they are called in magazines, or is it a whole other thing.
People want - and demand - simplicity, or else they seek it out even at the expense of remaining on corporate social media.
Some instances intentionally filter out votes such as non-humans, fuckin nazis, and also fuckin Tankies, so I expect at least a little variance in numbers.
Some instances also filter out trolls. Oddly enough, not all do that though...
Oh! Another big one would be Threads users. Some instances completely block FaceBook Threads.
Yes, although actually I am not aware of any instances that have NOT done this, even like a year or more before it needed done.