arbitrary emojis as reactions

[lupine]

From idle musing: https://voe.social/web/statuses/112946

I can boost toots, and I can favourite toots. Favouriting is a bit like bookmarking, only less so. Visually, it assigns the ⭐ emoji to the toot.

But what if I could choose the emoji it assigned to the toot? It could be 👍 or 🍣 or anything else at all.

Toots would store the fact of the favouriting alongside the emoji, and display the emoji + counts with a query like:

SELECT emoji, count(1) FROM favourites WHERE status_id = :id GROUP BY emoji

To an extent, this idea comes from the GitLab.com use of 'award emoji', which are often used as an ad-hoc voting mechanism, e.g.: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4058

It adds a degree of richness to your interaction with the issue / toot.

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• I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[lupine]

I'm happy to work on this feature and submit a PR if it's considered desirable. Just let me know!

[lupine]

We can migrate existing favourites by assigning the ⭐ emoji to them, of course. The emoji column can be character(1) or varchar(1).

[lupine]

GitLab emoji picker like:

[lupine]

Mastodon's frontend could probably fit 2-3 emoji in side by side. Once a toot gets more variety than that, it'd need to be promoted to a line of its own.

[Cassolotl]

Someone suggested reaction emojis in #1178 ("like" and "save" separately), and I'd be up for that. Saves could be made private, and I could react to toots by thumbs-up-ing or hearting without having to reply or clutter my saves.

[lupine]

Thanks for the link @Cassolotl

Emoji favourites would allow people to "save" toots by marking them with 💾 - or they could use a range of emoji to "save" toots in their own personal categorisation system.

The only remaining use case I see is the idea of allowing saves to be private. That'd need a private column on the favourites table and some soul-searching UI thought, but could reasonably be left out of a first implementation.

[Cassolotl]

I think if you can search for example all toots that you gave thumbs-up to, or whatever, then the reactions on a toot could be public but you could be only allowed to see all the toots you reacted to. So no one would be able to find all the toots you thumbs-upped, maybe?

Edit: But wait, then people wouldn't be notified of "likes". Hmmm. Maybe these feature requests aren't as similar as I thought!

[marrus-sh]

Historical note: #373

[eevee]

Nit: the emoji column can't be character(1) or varchar(1), because some "emoji" are actually vendor-invented ZWJ sequences of 7 or more codepoints.

Also since "emoji" is barely a real thing, maybe just let me react with any arbitrary codepoint.

Reconciling the above two paragraphs is left as an exercise. 😉

[fluffy-critter]

I would love to see this feature as well. How would this interact with instance-specific custom emoji?

I’d also love to see this in conjunction with UX that rolls up reactions into a bundle, Twitter-style. Also make it possible to opt out of seeing this stuff attached to your toots.

[Gargron]

Misskey federates these as Like activities with custom content (the content would be the emoji or shortcode of custom emoji, I guess). The challenge is not in the federation but the complexity and added performance overhead on retrieving the reactions. Because they are dynamic, they cannot be optimized with counter columns. It likely will remain impossible in Mastodon simply because I am not ready to make Mastodon slower and more expensive to run just for this.

[koyuawsmbrtn]

Since there is some code for reactions in the upcoming announcement feature do you plan to take this feature into consideration soon? @Gargron

[MattInternet]

Would it be sufficient to just allow "official" emojis and not instance specific ones?

[djayatillake]

Would it be sufficient to just allow "official" emojis and not instance specific ones?

Yes I think so you only really need about 10 to allow for my emotional range.

The LinkedIn ones are sufficient for me.

[damascene]

@koyuawsmbrtn which announcement. Is there any progress on this issue?

[koyuawsmbrtn]

@koyuawsmbrtn which announcement. Is there any progress on this issue?

No, instance admins can do announcements and this is the only place in Mastodon where people can react to something

[alexanderadam]

Now people are even asking to get this for Twitter 😆

[CupofDalek]

Bumping support +1

It feels like we are behind on this over at mastodon compared to misskey

[Bennytek]

I would absolutely love this as well - I've got my own Misskey instance set up at the moment and I think being able to react to posts with emoji is a pretty large part of why I use it so often 😅

[CupofDalek]

forreal, that's the #1 reason I hear people want to try misskey lol

[koyuawsmbrtn]

Hmm I'm thinking about having reactions Facebook-style (favs default and reaction on hover) and since Mastodon needs a little more resources such a feature can be justified now. Technology advanced quite well over the past 6 years. What's @Gargron's opinion on this topic now?

[shaedrich]

For what it's worth, on Telegram, you can configure as a group admin how many reaction emojis you allow

Additionally, in the timeline, emoji reactions could be grouped. I don't like the idea of treating them all as a like, but categorizing them to like five basic emotions might work, though.

[brendanjones]

It seems I’m in the minority here but I really don’t want this on Mastodon, it makes for a horribly busy and cluttered post UI. Stuff like this is why I use Mastodon, not other Fedi software like Misskey.

[UlyssesZh]

It seems I’m in the minority here but I really don’t want this on Mastodon, it makes for a horribly busy and cluttered post UI. Stuff like this is why I use Mastodon, not other Fedi software like Misskey.

Strictly speaking, you are free to use other UI (other clients).

[CupofDalek]

It seems I’m in the minority here but I really don’t want this on Mastodon, it makes for a horribly busy and cluttered post UI. Stuff like this is why I use Mastodon, not other Fedi software like Misskey.

Strictly speaking, you are free to use other UI (other clients).

Even as a supporter of this change, I think this argument works both ways. This was requested back in 2017, who knows if it will ever be added. Many features like this seem to be available on iceshrimp (misskey fork) or in catodon (iceshrimpfork)

I myself am taking this advice and not soon, but in the future hoping to switch to one of those two. Catodon's philosophy seems to align with me more, but its a newer project so I will stick to mastodon until it is out of alpha and more mature