When I look at Mastodon posts, I see a decent amount of replies and boosts for popular posts, but not very many stars (see example image). I assumed a star is the same as a like, but I feel not a lot of people star a post, whereas I did see a lot of hearts/likes on Twitter posts. Are they not equivalent?
In addition to what the others said, there was a „campaign“ a while ago that you should boost and not favorite on Mastodon.
Since there’s no algorithm that promotes liked posts in the timeline, liking something doesn’t do a whole lot.
As said above, likes are virtually useless. They're more like "noticeable bookmarks". Mastodon etiquette is to boost rather than like, if you enjoy a toot, and that's also how it was when the Twitter timeline was chronological and didn't include likes, a very long time ago.
On Masotdon, likes don't do anything to extend the reach of a post or make it popular in an algorithm like Twitter. It's literally just a regular like/favorite button, so use it if you want to like/favorite a post.
Edit: also yes, federation as others have said.
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