As part of a small party instance, I would like to point out that there are restrictions, e.g. only comments from users who are also followed by someone on their own instance are visible - unless the admin has linked the instance to an external bridge. Furthermore, I recommend to have contact details of an admin outside Mastodon at hand - because if the instance is not reachable, it will quickly become unpleasant.

If you know what you’re getting into and want to accept that so: You can find all instances on https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/list. In addition to Mastodon, I also recommend taking a look at Soapbox (e.g. postblue.social) or Firefish (e.g. firefish.social), which are more modern and offer many more features like formatted posts and quoted posts, but have no character limit like Mastodon.

The problem is that Mastodon, unlike Lemmy or Friendica, requires a mention of you to get a notification of a response, even if it’s your post. Plus, if you don’t have a follower from the instance of the user that replied (which is always the case if it’s a Lemmy-user), the reply won’t even appear.

I don’t see a solution for this.

The pupose of a Like button is to express that you like the post.

And even if this was the reasoning – which is baffling enough as it is

What is baffling about it? The function fulfills exactly the purpose that its name promises.

it wouldn’t make sense since the whole point of boosting something is to tell the public that you like a post.

With a boost, you pass the post to your followers. This is a different feature accordingly.

Like before Boost often seems useful, but hardly in case of bad news.