I see. From my point of view this is an add-on to allow me too posts and to give a free jail card for min char limit.
Perhaps it is needed.
My personal issue is how to translate this, because a boost it isn’t, as it has been understood in social media. This functionality is more or less expanded reaction. Perhaps it could replace reactions totally 
I think I’d like to see something like this:
https://gemini.google.com/share/c78659641710 (doesn’t work on mobile)
That’s really cool 
They’re not currently scanned by AI, but it’s certainly possible. It does work along with the watched words feature.
I don’t think the notification is sent, but they can still see the boost on the post when I test it.
This is still pretty early in development, more integration will come!
Yes!
So I was thinking. If someone makes a reply below the character limit, what about converting it into a boost instead of giving the “your post should be X characters” error?
I’m not sure such an automated conversion would be desirable. 90% of the time, when I want to post a too short message, it’s still a legitimate post that shouldn’t belong to boosts.
It’s almost always an answer to someone’s question and this answer ought to be read, quoted, linked, liked/reacted to, or marked as solutions. Then, I add filler text to reach the threshold.
I’m not sure. Can you give me an example of an actual post-level-not-boost-worthy response that’s around 15 characters?
Maybe instead of an automated conversion we can just add a composer notice like the “welcome to the community!” one? Seems like everybody wins there..
Something that contains a quote from or a link to a documentation topic where I don’t really need to add anything. Maybe you’d say that’s more than a few characters, but Discourse doesn’t count those (which sometimes makes me add empty spoilers). I think depending on the site settings it can be the same for images.
I think it will be difficult to find such posts with the search capabilities and I don’t have access to data explorer, but at least I’m not worried about exposing the legitimacy of my own short posts in plain sight 
I was going to say that (and Discourse should be counting them!!!1!)
On meta it could be interesting to look for posts marked as solutions with a low number of characters to have a good idea of such “legit” posts, I guess?
edit: can’t be sure about meta after all, but I’ve run a data explorer query on my forum to return short posts, and 95% (if not more) of them would perfectly fit as quips. I mean, boosts.
And I can imagine that if all of those posts were boosts, topics would contain less fragmented information and be less cluttered by low-value content, which would in turn increase the value of the insights found within those topics 
(uh, as kris said earlier… 
)
I would say that if we have to go through so much effort to find a single example to prove your point, then maybe it’s not a very good point 
Ah, you replied before I ended editing my post precisely to validate your point
Which made my reply kinda non-sequitur after I posted it 
I find it a bit weird that we can boost with a single emoji. It looks like an easy way to circumvent the reaction’s emoji set.
This
(Argh 20 characters)
Basecamp is a popular low-friction project management tool. Their “boosts” are very much like this.
Mastodon “boosts” are their version of a simple retweet, or Tumblr’s reblog. I felt for a moment that using this term could be confusing – but the intent is obvious as soon as you use it.
It does have that sound. I don’t know what else I’d name it, but if it’s rolled in as a kind of enhanced reaction I suppose it wouldn’t need a name at all.
anything that would need to be quoted, linked to, searched, bookmarked, crawled by search engines, replied to by email, etc… sometimes in a work environment it might be a simple “yes do this,” generally I wouldn’t recommend using boosts for any information that needs to be relied on
I think your mockup merging boosts with reactions is great. I’d also give the feedback that we’re already seeing quite a bit of visual noise in the boosts. The choice of small user portraits makes sense, but with the many lines of photos + text + pills, combined with reactions + boosts, it’s a lot to scan and understand. It significantly increases the complexity and confusion of a feature like reactions that I think is much more intuitive for people.
As demoed today, I’d leave it disabled, but if it was merged with reactions instead of a separate system and if the display of boosts was reduced to a single line by default (but expandable), I think those would be some nice UX enhancements that make this much less confusing and much less clutter in the UI.