Why YSK: your upvotes (favorites) and downvotes( reduces) are public information.
If you are browsing through https://kbin.social/ or whatever just click on “more” then activity.
There you’ll see info like boosts, reduces (downvotes), and favorites (upvotes?)
Works with all instances for lemmy or kbin material
A boost is like a Twitter “retweet”, it reposts the content to the booster’s personal timeline for people who follow them to see. For example, right now, two people have boosted your question. If you go to “more –> activity” you can see who boosted you, go to their profiles and find your comment “What’s the difference between a favorite and a boost?” on their respective profiles under boosts.
Also, at least in kbin.social, it allows the user to save the post/comment (i don’t know how to bookmark otherwise).
(post) upvotes are actually your favourites - https://kbin.social/fav
It’s a bodge from when kbin and Lemmy started federating with each other and had to merge their systems. Before that boosts were the kbin upvotes, but they aren’t used on Lemmy.
Another important difference is the “reputation score” for each user profile.
I understand the reasoning why the devs separated favourites and boosts but your average user (especially reddit refugees) do not understand this. I think that reputation should also include favourites in the calculation.
I personally use reputation as an indicator that I’m contrbuting in a postive way to a community not really as a winning “fake internet points” thing.