And why must I create a new ‘article’ to make a thread and not a post - which I think makes a new microblog.
I’m coming from a Mastodon POV, I run my own instance and have a pretty good idea (I think) about how federation works. The way ActivityPub is used is close enough to be familiar but also… not; very uncanny valley.
Additionally, if upvotes are favourites, what are downvotes? and how are they federated?
So, the way federation works is not dissimilar to the way newspaper or magazine subscriptions work. If you subscribe to someone or something (called an ‘actor’ in generic terms) on the Fediverse - be it a person or a group - you’re asking the hosting server to send you everything that actor published from that point onward.
You don’t get the back catalogue, only the new stuff.
So, if you’re the first person on your instance to subscribe to a remote community, you’ll only get stuff posted after you subscribe.
“Boosting” is basically a way of republishing content. So, if you subscribe to a 3 year old community today, you won’t see anything posted yesterday or any day before today. But if someone boosts an older post or comment, the group actor will re-send it to everyone who is subscribing.
In the microblogging sphere, that means the booster is sending the post to anyone who follows the booster. You cna see the same post boosted a hundred times. Mastodon does some light deduplication for users if requested, but that’s about it. Here, I assume there is heavy deduplication taking place, so people don’t see the same post a dozen times. But if you don’t already have the post on your instance, the boost will transmit it and make it visible.
So a boost is more of a sort of “revive necrothread” than anything else, and only serves to give visibility to content that is no longer on people’s radar?
if not, what is the point of me boosting a comment someone else made 5 minutes ago? Is it because people who might follow me but not subscribe to the thread the comment was in, would otherwise not see it? So like, it’s retweeting it to bring attention of that comment to my social circle?
Yes and no. Again, there seems to be some precautions in place to prevent boosted comments or posts from being rendered as duplicates here, and I don’t think it’s pushing anything to the top of any of the sorted feeds (though maybe it gets counted as an upvote as well? I’m not sure). It just re-sends it anyone following the booster. And then the group re-sends it to everyone following the group.
This is actually really easy to see on Mastodon, since Mastodon doesn’t handle groups differently from any other actor. Groups on Mastodon appear just as another user, and you interact with the group by @-ing it. You subscribe to a group by following the group actor, and the group actor will boost any messages it receives. You can create a new thread by @-ing the group in a top level post, or you can reply to a post by replying to a top-level post boosted by the group actor.
And the the group actor boosts it right back at you.
Thank you, this makes sense! I mean, it also makes me think this becomes exceptionally noisy as the boosts may grow at a low exponential rate as the number of users expands, but I will watch it and see how it works here :)
It is noisy, but it’s also the only way to really make sure content propagates content the network.