a small difference, but important to how people use the site
Yea, i’m working on my own Fedi software and i’m struggling with the point of boosting in the link aggregator context. It’s an odd overlap with Reddit-style reposting to appropriate subs, but based on the user.
It makes sense in the Twitter UX, but i struggle to find it’s place in the Reddit UX.
Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.
When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.
With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.
if old content isnt fetched for a newly subscribed instance to see, how are users going to boost that content in the first place?
Users who can see the content need to boost it?
Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they’ve seen.