I apologize to everyone who I told that another's favorites are visible to their followers. They are not. I definitely misunderstood somehow. The person who knows you favorited a post as the owner of the account the post came from. Still, I'm glad favoriting let's the poster know I like their post.

@lynnskyi there's some nuance to this.

Favorites are only federated between the original instance and the instance that has the user that favorited it. Therefore people on your instance can see favorites on a specific post from users within your instance, but everyone on other instances will see different favorite statistics for the same post based on the favorites from their instance.

I hope that makes sense and clears it up further.