In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
That’s what boosts are for. You can see what others boost on their profile as a sort of repost. The like, is not a like, it’s there for feature parity with Xitter. But every app and instance calls it something different, but generally it’s a favorite button. So you have, boost, favorite, and bookmark. Boost are intended to be seen by others, favorites are for the original poster, and bookmarks are private for yourself. I’ve read that quote boosts are coming, but I’m not a fan of the feature. Find it to be really toxic. But we’ll see how it pans out when the feature is implemented.