Mastodon’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.

In roughly the past half-decade, Microsoft went from nowhere to overwhelming dominance of text editors with VSCode, ownership of majority of code hosting (and open source dev) with GitHub, ownership of the dependency stack used by most devs with npm, control over the most popular single language with TypeScript, and is trying to position copilot and ChatGPT as inevitable parts of the future dev process. Nothing negative for the ecosystem will come of this, as the last half century teaches us.