That's likely an Mbin issue. Ernst, the creator of the original product Kbin before it got forked and taken over as Mbin, made a confusing decision to have both upvotes and boosts together, and not just on the microblog (Mastodon) side with magazines but even side-by-side also on the Threadiverse with communities. So when you press the "upvote"... I forget which action even occurs - upvoting vs. boosting. Sorting by votes also gets very wonky.

And yes, all those weird design decisions very much scare people away from Mbin: the largest Mbin instance has only <500 active accounts and all Mbin instances combined have mere hundreds of users. For comparison, the flagship PieFed instance has >1k users, the NSFW one has twice that, and Lemmy.world alone has >13k!!!

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 3 points 12 hours ago

Honestly I have no idea how all this works, it seems very confusing. But luckily I don't need to understand it to use it lol. I just picked the Australia zone because I live there

[–] inkblade@lemmy.world 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

It is suppose to be ranked by upvotes.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 6 hours ago

But which upvote type - boosts or votes? Why do boosts exist at all then, if they don't "boost" anything? I thought I remembered (granted it's been a couple of years since I migrated from Reddit to kbin.social) that it was boosts, and it was upvotes that existed but were irrelevant? (If so, but not anymore, then how and why was that changed?)

Not that you need to answer every one of these - I'm just sharing my confusion, which many people seem to also share.