How do favourites and up/down votes work? What are the different purposes of each?

I see this post is current at +24 and has 12 favourites. If I click on favourites (or boosts) at the bottom then I get a list of who favorited it.
But if I click on favourite in a comment, it just adds 1 to the favourite count.

I agree. I hate Twitter but really enjoy Mastodon, because of the people and content it draws (at least what I see).

I want the Fediverse to walk a fine line between providing a platform that interests a niche group without gatekeeping and which sustains enough interest to sustain itself.

It looks good and provides a much-needed service.
Thanks for the effort

I'm simply overwhelmed by all the servers and channels on Discord.

I like 18xx board games. I know of seven Discord servers that deal with them, but each has a dozen or two channels for topics I don't care about. If I want to find something, I have to do separate searches in each server. Plus I have to scroll through and mute all the extra channels in each server, which takes way too much effort on mobile.