Added 🚀 to Discover for today.
@manton I’d love to see video games added as an emoji topic to the discover section via 🎮 and/or 🕹. I really think the emoji topics are a great way to discover new people and discussions to follow. /cc @macgenie
@manton discovery by adding Emoji might look and sound fun, but it doesn't scale. I see two other approaches: autolink Emoji use on posts to a "discovery" search (of all posts with same Emoji as the linked one), or implement search.
@daiwei What part do you think doesn't scale? One of the appeals of emoji is that there are a limited number. Admittedly thousands, but much fewer that make sense to use in Discover.
@manton I have to admit I don’t understand why the number of emoji or topics is an issue. There can be as many as you’ll/the platform will allow. Whether it’s 10 or 1000, you’re the one setting the limit, not the pictograph/word source.
@oyam To me, the difference is that it wouldn't be acceptable if we allowed hashtags but only #books and nothing else. Because emoji are already finite, focusing on a smaller set doesn't seem as unusual.
I decided to autolink emoji on my website and it's been kind of fun! Here are all the emoji I've used in posts: https://aaronparecki.com/emoji
@manton Yes, that is what I was referring. A handful of them isn't a problem, but more will be. If browsing is to be rich, I don't see any other way than a search, or #tags, or as I said, linked emoji (equivalent of a #tag, but with emoji).
@daiwei I think linking could be a good idea, by the way. To follow up, though... What problems do you see if we had 100 or 200 emoji? (Really trying to understand the "scale" comment because I want to plan for this.)
@manton scale was, probably, the wrong word. Imagine 100, or 200 emoji at the top of the discover page. In my opinion, visually unappealing. Now, having them all on their own page would be something different.
@manton I’m kinda hoping hashtags will never happen. I think I’ve settled on the micropub/rss way of doing categories. They are metadata out of the content of the post. You can say we have “books” category, and I can attach that to my post (like Indigenous does, for eg.) The post is left alone. M.b doesn’t even need to render the categories on m.b if not desired (or it can be a template option), but I can still get them via rss or micropub. Rest of the stuff works like it does now. You can list the categories/topics on top of Discover. The fact that it’s emoji or word doesn’t really change anything. You could even render them as emoji for brevity on Micro.blog and in discover. But on the back end, they are plain categories. As for abuse, there is no net change compared to now - I can attach any categories I want, but m.b will only recognize the ones you set up, and I attach any category to any post.
@manton Emojis is fine as long as we can discover the section. Adding links to all may not be really usable. But I think the search in discover should understand emoji search and return the emoji discover posts. It does not currently. Should solve the display of directory problem.
@oyam I would love to lose hashtags here, but cross-posting to Twitter forces my hand. Would be great if you could set categories here and have them added during the rebroadcast phase. Do you know anyone doing that?
@jhull I don’t think we get control over the cross posting, that’s something @mantonnwould have to build in. As it currently stands, m.b doesn’t use categories at all, it was purely a theoretical discussion, but I hope at some point it will.