Wait really?? That’s cool x_x

How do I see if my instance has custom emojis? Do I have to nag my admin to add new emojis? Exciting!! 🤯

Edit: can I just… upload it? Let me try

I mean it works, but it isn’t the same thing :(

Can I use another instance’s emojis?

Seems like the answer is yes.

Can I see a list of emojis from all instances, maybe searchable?

Reddit’s hatred of emojis was completely asinine. The only thing I could ever get anyone to say was that they hated emojis because they made people seem immature. But to my mind, caring that much and enforcing your thoughts on something immature is really immature. I posed the question about a month ago about why that was as early Redditfugees were asking how we could make Lemmy a better place, culturally, than Reddit ever was, and someone suggested that women use emojis more than men, and it was a way to gate keep Reddit’s misogynistic culture. I’m not at all convinced of that, but it was interesting conceptually. Ultimately, I think where I fall is on the immaturity thing. People are so desperate to be seen as mature that they’ll shitpost a lame joke that everyone, including themselves, know is lame, and bully people for using emoji. It’s average 13-14 year old behavior

🎉

I am not against emojis overall. But to put it in perspective, the way emojis work they do draw a lot of extra attention to themselves. Specifically because they don’t follow text color so are really distinct. So to me, personally, a text with a lot of emojis sprinkled in can come across as busy to the point of distracting to read or a bit shouty.

In my (again personal) view emojis, smilies, etc are most useful when used in moderation on key points in a message. It’s also with that reason that on platforms like Lemmy, reddit or basically any old forum I do think they generally don’t have a place in titles.

I hope that this makes sense? 🙂

Edit: To maybe clarify it a bit further

Emojis can also basically be a type of “fluff content”:

“The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.”

Source: Article by Paul Graham

What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:

1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge.
2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.

So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E and F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them, so they gather votes faster.

To get back to the title thing I mentioned. More often than not I see people use emojis in titles not to strengthen the title, but simply to draw attention to it. And the same thing I have seen in in messages in general. Like I said above, it then starts to approach “shouting” from my perspective. So it isn’t emojis themselves I then have an issue with, it is just that they then fall in the same category as ALL CAPS and bolded text that shouldn’t be bolded and all that.

I have photosensitivity. I need to get animated emojis off my screen as quickly as possible since they bring me closer to my seizure threshold.
Think of it like a cup. Skimming quickly past a few animated emojis won’t fill the cup on their own, but if it’s already full from other things, even that little bit is a risk for it spilling over into a seizure. If I were to try to read a lengthy post with animated emojis, forget it.
Laugh at me if it makes you feel superior. You probably are.

These are essentially my thoughts. They’re helpful for indicating context (tone/expression/sentiment). The goal of language is communication; words alone can struggle with that. Well-placed emojis help improve communication. Numerous emojis breaking up sentences makes them harder to read; imo it impairs communication.

I also don’t like the idea of policing others’ use of a harmless sub-dialect of online communication just because one decides not to use it themselves. I personally don’t use or enjoy the ‘emojis’ that are just ‘fun graphics we like’ (most Discord custom emotes are this). Nor do I like that filter where 1-3 emojis are inserted after basically every single word. But that’s because it’s not my online dialect; it doesn’t mean people who use emojis that way are ‘wrong’.

Different platforms have different ‘accents’, and emojis are only one example of that. I find the numerous dialects of online English to be a fascinating topic that isn’t often considered.

Sometimes I’d feel sad that a trait of say, Tumblr’s dialect didn’t have a Reddit equivalent: Tumblr uses punctuation, capitalisation, and even typos as a tone indicator. A Redditor doesn’t know the different tones implied amongst these, even though most Tumblr users do:

• no. stop
• no stop
• noo staaaaahp
• noolkjaflakud STOP
• No. Stop.
• NO STOP

I can tell which of these are vaguely upset, genuinely upset, or pretending to be upset in a few different ways. Reddit doesn’t have that, because it expects everybody to write with formal grammar all the time, including not ‘allowing’ emojis as tone indicators. I suspect that formal writing style probably contributes to why so many comments are read in bad faith as smug/adversarial. 😢