My understanding is that favorites are equivalent to twitter likes, and boosts are equivalent to twitter retweets, but on twitter people like way more then they retweet, so why is it different on mastodon?
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Mastodon has no algorithm, instead the users determine what spreads - so boosting posts is what helps them be shown to more people.
Favoriting a post on Mastodon doesn’t show it to your followers, so it doesn’t contribute to the “algorithm” the way boosting a post does. But it does tell the creator that you liked their content!