@panos brought up something interesting recently, which is that Lemmy communities don’t boost everything (at least when viewed from Mastodon), but just the original post.
I wasn’t sure whether this was intentional (because 1b12 definitely specifies that everything is boosted, replies and all). The only explanation I can think of is that 1b12 boosts activities, and Mastodon doesn’t understand that, so it’s actually an implementation quirk that causes Mastodon to not actually see the entire conversation.
NodeBB used to Announce(Note) and Announce(Create(Note)), and it meant that Mastodon was seeing everything. This was desirable from a synchronization standpoint, but it meant everything was going into Mastodon user feeds, which was @panos’ concern.
I think Guppe (which is kind of like 1b12? Not sure) boosts everything, but again, am not 100% sure.
I have been following a Lemmy community from Firefish and I only get original posts, you can see this behaviour here: https://electricrequiem.com/[@[email protected]](https://community.nodebb.org/user/comradeship%40lemmygrad.ml) However Firefish has had problems with following Lemmy communities so this may not be the default behaviour from Mastodon.
Still, I do think that boosting all replies is not ideal, especially for busy forums. If a topic gets say 50 replies, it can really flood your timeline. Also personally I have set up my Firefish account to only show me original posts (and boosts), to have a cleaner and more compact timeline. With a forum account that boosts everything, you can’t filter replies, they all end up in your timeline.
So my suggestion was to perhaps create two accounts for following a forum, one than boosts everything and one that boosts only original posts. This way users would get a choice, and if they find that following everything makes their timeline too busy, they can choose to get only original posts, instead of unfollowing the forum completely.