Folks; unsure where to place this and how to discuss it, yet: As I apparently have quite a bunch of Mastodon accounts following me, the last couple of weeks I then and now received odd feedback from people wondering whether I am not really interested in any interactions out here, and learnt that in all of these cases, someone apparently started following me and leaving “likes” on my posts which I never noticed as micro.blog doesn’t support that.
From many perspectives I can understand and am pretty comfortable with not making these information available visibly on pages. Yet, at the moment this feels like “lost communication” without even a chance to somehow “react” to it. So, wonder whether there’s any way to provide feedback for this kind of interactions out on micro.blog, too? And be it some sort of collected daily notification via e-mail or a dedicated status page? These features seem to be just “too” common in todays Fediverse to really explain people why they are missing / go unnoticed over here… 
Thanks and best,
Kristian
How would someone on Mastodon suspect that you aren’t seeing the likes? I get replies from Mastodon folks but don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone questioning whether I’m seeing things. Most people just assume I’m assuming Mastodon, I think.
To actually answer your question, though, we’re not currently planning on anything with likes. I feel like it’s a slippery slope, as soon as we add something like that, it will naturally devolve into the usual game of showing like counts which we’ve tried to resist. Perhaps there’s an elegant way to solve this to provide some info from Mastodon, but I’m not seeing how to do it.
The most common thing I learnt here is that, in some(?) cases, people consider “likes” and “follows” to be interactions too that should at least get some kind of response (not necessarily a follow-back). In such cases it would randomly end up in weird comments or personal messages on that, with people apparently assuming not responding to a bunch of “likes” or “following” means one is intentionally ignoring them. Sounds a bit weird I guess, but seems that’s a thing here and there… . No real idea whether there’s a “smart” answer to that. (Would be better if ActivityPub had some support to signal whether or not a certain system has a particular capability, like displaying “likes”, “responses”, “direct messages” but this isn’t the case at the moment…)
I have not heard of anyone expecting me to respond to their “likes.” On Instagram stories, I think you can “like” their emoji response but that starts getting too circuitous.
I’m on Micro.blog because of their deliberate choice of not showing likes or even follower counts or even who is following me. You can gently remind those people who assume you are ignoring their likes by asking them to drop in a reply even if it’s a word or two or even an emoji. You can interact with that on Micro.blog. It’s a more meaningful interaction anyway, according to me.
I’m not saying you haven’t experienced this, but I am registering that I have no idea how anyone would ever expect me to do anything because of a like or a boost? Those interactions are inherently uni-directional and designed to be low interaction.
That said, given that Micro.blog is explicitly not doing “likes” or any kind of mechanism like that, I think your best bet is something like Brid.gy – I’ve never used it, because I don’t care about this stuff, but I bet that there’s some kind of way it can read Mastodon/AP likes and convert them to a webmention, maybe, to the original post. Not totally sure how. Then you’d have to do some work to display web mentions (the conversation.js script that Manton makes available for this I think is only for replies, not likes, but others have done stuff with likes).
Actually, both my Twitter/X and my Tumblr crowd is pretty much used to using favourites and reshares as primary means of communication; especially on Tumblr this seems way more common than leaving a comment. Not that I don’t get your point, but guess I’ll have to find another way then. Don’t really need or want that stuff to be digestable or displayable on a public pages, it’s more, like, making sure communication obvious and common within a certain crowd isn’t missed. (The other option would be to completely give up on using micro.blog for Mastodon and post to another Mastodon/Friendica instance instead, but I’m unsure whether I can disable that feature altogether…)
I mean yes, people like and reshare things. But how is that something you are meant to reply to in some way? None of those platforms really result in you saying something back when someone reshares or likes a post. You don’t like a like, or say “thanks for the retweet!” the way people did in 2010.
That said, yes you can turn off your ActivityPub compatible stream from your Micro.blog if you want and natively cross post into Mastodon (or do neither).
It’s not that I don’t think people use those features, it’s that I don’t even understand what the interaction model is for mutuality on a like.
I’ve never encountered anyone expecting a response from a like or a follow. And I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 and Facebook since 2009.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m just surprised to hear it.
I would like if micro.blog would allow me to like other people’s post, and show me how many likes my posts get and who likes them. Reasons:
I’m going to continue this discussion in the feature requests topic.
I started a separate topic for my tangent.
I have never felt like anybody needs to follow me on social. Not the other people I follow on social, not my RL co-workers, not my friends and not my family. I post a lot of links to articles, memes, and vintage ads and I know that’s not to everyone’s liking.
I’ve always seen social media and blogging as being like having an elaborate train set in the basement. When friends or family come to visit, it’s great to bring them down to the basement to show off your hobby–if that’s what they like. But if not, that’s fine too, and it’s rude to apply pressure.
I love blogging and I love model trains so this analogy is really interesting, @MitchWagner! 
I’ll have to think on that some more.
Interesting. I have experienced this ever since my early Flickr days (around 2005 I guess) when a “favourite” or a “star” back then was at times even stronger an interaction than a comment, you’d get a load of “generic comments” like “neat angle”, “love the colours”, “well captured” back then but people would thank each other for leaving “stars” on images. Haven’t really questioned it ever since, so I’m surprised to see it’s not like this for everyone. Not that I really need to have that feature to show off how great my stuff is or to have a metric of whether or not people read my irrelevant points, but quite a load of inspiring contacts I made especially on Twitter were actually contacts who, at some point, started interacting with me by resharing or “liking” posts, and I usually am interested in who does that and looking into their profiles to see who they are. Not sure, again, whether this is relevant to anyone but me - I see the bigger “issue”(?) here actually in how the majority of the Fediverse works and what kind of features people on the other end are there to expect from your system to support. Considering interactions or boosts “communication”, in this case it means communication is lost, and I don’t really like lost communication. (Plus, I definitely share the idea of being able to use micro.blog as a fully-fledged Fediverse platform without requiring a Mastodon, Firefish, … account, but that’s a different thing at least for me.). 
I do notice likes/reshares/boosts if I recognize the username. Sometimes I simply notice that they’ve liked my posts multiple times, in which case I’ll check out their profile and, if it looks interesting, follow them back.
But as I said earlier, I don’t automatically do that, and I don’t consider it a violation of etiquette, not even when I’m on the giving end of the like.