Darkscribes Community

Another annoying thing about the current custom emoji spec in the fediverse: the type is just called Emoji instead of CustomEmoji. Such a small detail, but it creates unnecessary ambiguity between Unicode emojis and custom ones. I ran into this while implementing BotKit and had type name collisions with Emoji—had to use awkward namespacing to work around it. These little inconsistencies make implementation more tedious than it needs to be.

@[email protected] Yeah, if it's standardized al text should be considered…

@[email protected] I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I personally don't have much motivation to standardize custom emoji. While I understand many people enjoy this feature, I'm not particularly fond of custom emoji functionality in general. My limited interest in the feature itself, combined with the significant accessibility issues it creates, makes it difficult for me to get excited about investing time in standardization efforts. Though I respect that others might feel differently!

As someone who has developed several #ActivityPub software implementations (Fedify, Hollo, BotKit, and Hackers' Pub), I believe one of the most frustrating features to implement in the #fediverse is #custom_emoji.

The challenges are numerous:

First, there's no standardization. ActivityPub specifications don't define how custom emoji should work, leading to inconsistent implementations across different servers like Mastodon and Misskey.

Rendering is particularly problematic. Emojis must display properly across different contexts (in text, as reactions, in emoji pickers) while maintaining quality at various sizes. Animated emojis add another layer of complexity.

Perhaps most concerning is the poor #accessibility. Most implementations simply use the emoji code (like :party_blob:) as the alt text, which provides no meaningful information to screen reader users (in particular, non-English speakers) about what the emoji actually depicts or means.

What really dampens my motivation to implement this feature is knowing I'm investing significant effort into something that ultimately creates accessibility barriers. It's disheartening to work hard on a feature that excludes part of the community.

#fedidev