Steven T. DennisMastodon’s limitations mean it relies more on its users to surface good content. Search doesn’t really work. There are far fewer suggested posts. QTs don’t really exist yet. Trending doesn’t really work. So boosting becomes the absolutely critical way for other people to find interesting things. IE, if you see something you like, boost/RT it, tag people who you think might be interested, etc.
Boosts on here are what will make or break Mastodon. If people can find other interesting people and content, they will stay and the site will grow. If its too much of a chore, they won’t. Other sites reward lazier social media grazing, and they surface content designed to maximize engagement, which often = lies, hate, stuff that enrages rather than enlightens. Mastodon just surfaces what imembers boost.
Christopher Cruz 
@steventdennis reading the string of replies and conversations spawning off this thread is fascinating, and for me highlights some of the bigger technical and cultural items that both help and hinder Mastodon: Feature sets, user experiences, and access disparities that are astonishingly different across apps/web; Not a lot of hand holding for new users to get started or get content served up to them; Half its users want to create Twitter 2.0 while the others want to create the anti-Twitter; And a general disinterest or disbelief in the “virtue signaling” that sometimes accompanies the migration to Mastodon. It seems like the competition has always been against Twitter, but from these observations it feels like Mastodon is actually much more like a Reddit masquerading behind a Twitter UX, and could potentially benefit from surfacing the best of each of those while avoiding the pitfalls currently engrained in both.