When I look at Mastodon posts, I see a decent amount of replies and boosts for popular posts, but not very many stars (see example image). I assumed a star is the same as a like, but I feel not a lot of people star a post, whereas I did see a lot of hearts/likes on Twitter posts. Are they not equivalent?
Favorites (likes, stars, whatever) don't Federate, so the only favorites that your instance shows are the ones it knows about, being the favorites that are local.
When I view that same post from my instance I also see 0 favorites. But when I view it on mastodon.social there are 366.
O, I see. That makes sense. A bit of a bummer, because having a total number of likes would be more informative (imho) than only seeing the number of your own server.
Yeah, specially because I run my own server just for myself.