Glyph

An emoji-only social media platform. Posts are composed entirely of emoji, reactions are a single emoji (max 3 per user per post), and every post gets a unique 3-word magic URL.

Getting started

Install dependencies

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Run the server

.venv/bin/python server.py

Open http://localhost:8080.

Updating emoji data

The emoji picker is powered by a generated file at public/emoji-data.js. To pick up new Unicode emoji versions:

.venv/bin/pip install --upgrade emoji
.venv/bin/python scripts/generate_emoji_data.py

The script pulls from the emoji Python package and writes 3,900+ emoji across 9 categories with names for search. The generated file includes a version header — do not edit it by hand.

Deploying

The app is configured for Fly.io with a persistent volume for SQLite.

fly volumes create glyph_data --region syd --size 1
fly secrets set SECRET_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32)
fly deploy