Boost, to my understanding, is only a thing on Kbin. Ernest coded Kbin to have better connectivity with Mastodon (Boost was originally our analogue for a retweet) then Lemmy does, and that's one of the options he made (the Microblog section being another. The non-Kbin instances (so all of lemmy, and thus most of the people who can read this thread) just don't have a Boost button.

That being said Boost has changed a bit in terms of how it works since it was created, and it's gonna keep being changed (literally they have said they are working on it lol). For me I basically Boost anything I upvote as a force of habit at this point.

Edit: And to those even from Kbin who don't know since I see some of you in the comments - It's currently like a super upvote. Boost something and it'll make the comment rise higher in the thread, like higher upvoted comments on a reddit thread would go up to the top. (Less if it's changed since the time I learned that from some other fediverse schmuck lmao).

It doesn't exist here on Lemmy.

Nobody knows what the damn boost button actually does. Upvote's nice and simple.

TIL boost exists.

Now i have a question - why have two different systems of showing that you like the content? Why do we need boost AND upvote?

Kbin is like a go-between for Mastodon and Lemmy.

"Boost" is Mastodon's version of "retweet", but Lemmy doesn't have anything like that.

Boost button?

Since twitter doesn’t exist, they should just rename boost to retweet.

One of the kbin mobile apps “Artemis” has the option to link the upvote to boost.

It is a Kbin only thing but since I signed up to Mastodon recently it makes a lot more sense.

Because Kbin is tied to Mastodon if you use your Kbin account to also post to Mastodon by clicking 'Boost'

In Twitter terms, you're retweeting that comment or post straight to your Mastodon feed for your followers to see.

I set up a separate Mastodon account because I want to use them as different networks at this point, but I can see the appeal of having that ability to crosspost between platforms

EDIT And as the other person said, within Kbin if something is getting Boosted (ie retweeted) it will pick up on that and the comment or post will be pushed further up the list if you're viewing things by Hot or Top I think. But only on Kbin so most people here won't know

The only time I really paid attention to it was when upvotes didn't work to actually upvote people.

I don't really see the point of boost.

I guess some people are saying it's like retweets, but since I never really retweeted either....

I don't like Boost. I experimented for a few days on Mastodon and was seeing random comments in the middle of a conversation in my feed because some boost happy users.

If it has to exist, it better have some tight guardrails.

It's funny but I've observed that myself. A lot of my posts are simply favorited which doesn't mean a whole lot because all it is doing is telling the author of the post that you simply like it. By boosting the post, you're telling the author that not only do you like it, but the post contains useful information, a great philosophy, or even material you could somehow relate to.

Most of us here don't us kbin and therefore don't even see the boost button.

I see and use it on Firefish.social though.