I think that would be annoying!

I would hate this personally. (tho you can take that with a grain of salt, I'm not "from" fedi and I'm still getting used to that voters on a post are viewable at all.) I don't always upvote things because I love them enough to share, sometimes it's just like a pat on the back

I'm not sure why this wasn't the approach. Why would you not want a boost, whatever it really does, when you upvote something? Or vise versa, boost but not upvote? It seems they both have similar or the same objectives, so just make the upvote button (that everyone uses for some positive reason) do it all.

I'm in favor of removing a visible number for reputation/votes and put in a vague ranking system like lots of forums had/have that only shows how active a person is in delivering discussion that's appreciated. Remove downvote effects and just have them a visual on the posts themselves.

I mean from that description, it sounds like it is just like retweeting something. Good to know. Don't boost porn. Got it.

Fortunately, on Mastodon at least, you can set a per person ignore/hide on boosts. Very helpful if they do good posts but are generally spammy with boosts.

Eh. I think a combination of remembering how indifferently casual my sphere of tumblr and old Twitter used to be along with knowing the thing tied to reputation was initially boost instead of the formerly decorative upvote button (it's fixed now) made me fairly free with who gets it.

Doesn't have to be profound, just has to be something I really enjoyed or found important, and which I wouldn't mind passing along to others. If I would normally hand the phone over to show it off irl, y'all get to look at it. Sometimes that's breaking news. Sometimes that's just a picture of a turtle.

I have like four people following me (hi peeps, why tho?) and honestly they made that decision. If they didn't want to hear the things I wanna talk about, they wouldn't choose to follow me and they should be amending that.

I had read suggestions that it was a refreshing of the post into the feed, so an old or new post that got boosting would get new life for visibility.

This is true for the microblogging services, but boosting is pretty much pointless for kbin/lemmy users (right now). On the microblogging systems, you have two signals you can send about a post, like and boost. A like doesn't affect the post and just lets the author know you liked it. A boost literally boosts the posts and presents it to your followers, even if they don't follow the OP.

A like is mapped to an upvote on lemmy/kbin. But the visibility boosting is probably why kbin originally mapped upvotes to boosts, since they're both about enhancing visibility. The problem is lemmy already used likes and microblogging users dont like being overwhelmed with boosts and users outside a forum are more likely to like a post so like <-> upvote allows non-forum users to affect voting.