Eliminating Mastodon "boosted" posts from your stream (for Hubzilla and Streams users)
I suppose my Hubzilla and Streams contacts all know this already, and my Mastodon etc contacts will have no idea what I'm talking about. Anyway:
We've got an optional tool called "Friend Zoom" (Streams) or "Affinity Slider" (Hubzilla). You can assign your contacts a number from 0 (best friend who you always want to read) through 99 (contacts that you don't often want to read), and adjust the cutoff point with a slider if you're inundated with too much stuff.
In Streams, and I assume in Hubzilla, your contacts are assigned 80 unless you manually change their number. Everyone else in the Fediverse is at 99.
When your Mastodon buddy boosts a post, this appears to Hubzilla and Streams users as the original post that was boosted, by the original author -- who is rated 99 if he's not one of your contacts. So if you move the slider to 98, all boosted posts vanish from your stream. (I have tried this only on Streams -- I assume it's the same on Hubzilla. Maybe one of you can verify.)
However, if your Hubzilla or Streams contact shares a post, the mechanism is different. This creates a new post by your contact (rated 80 or whatever you've reset him to), containing the shared post. So it will not vanish when you move the slider to 98.
For me, this is good news and bad news, because I'd like to see some boosted posts but not others. I'll have to think about how I want to use this. What are the rest of you doing (on Hubzilla/Streams)?