@kitten yeah, that's a big part of why i think stock mastodon needs reactions yesterday. i stick mostly to favorites because about 30-40% of my mutuals wouldn't receive the equivalent if i made it a react instead
(akk/pler)oma separates favorites and reactions , so they're entirely different things . you seem to be on iceshrimp.net which replicates the same exact behavior , so liking a post is a like , and reacting a post is sending a pure reaction ; if the receiving end doesn't support reactions then it'll just drop it (as most fediverse software act when they come across something they don't know how to handle)
on misskey based instances (or might just be sharkey and firefish/iceshrimp-js ?) reactions are the only thing that exist , so to compensate , they send it as a reaction to be displayed on instances with support for reactions as well as a "like" to instances that don't support reactions (or just as a fallback)