

Whenever you like, honestly. It’s mostly a nice acknowledgment to the poster that you appreciated their post. Unlike commercial social media it’s not sending out anything to your followers that you interacted with it (at least last I checked).
I think many people boost more than favorite because it functions a little similarly in regards to acknowledgment, with the bonus that it helps share the post to others which is even more relevant in federated networks than on centralized platforms.
For those that may only vote and otherwise lurk, there’s a decent amount.
The inability to create multi-communities/reddits (or feeds as Piefed calls them), the absence of post-folding/deduplication for when someone posts the same article to multiple communities (sometimes similar, sometimes distinct), the absence of keyword filtering to automatically filter out stuff from local/all feeds one’s uninterested in, and these are just a few from the top of my head for those that mostly lurk.