I love emoji, but I seem to have become grumpy about custom emoji (like Slack or Mastodon) because they don’t actually work anywhere else on the web. Maybe it’s time for me to let go and embrace the fun, despite the inconsistencies.

@manton I say stick to your guns. You’ve done well until now.

@manton it’s the animated ones that I am grumpy about.

@manton I hate those as well.

@manton I feel conflicted about them, but come down on the side of appreciating the way they can act like little ambassadors from a community, especially the way they work in Twitch and Discord.

@manton there are some very specific Slack custom ones I have in one place and it drives me bananas not having them in other Slacks because they’re so dang useful.

@manton I can barely tell the difference between lots of them even with my reading glasses on which makes it a lot easier to be blasé about them. ;)

@manton I prefer cross-platform operability over customizability. I love how some apps show their own skins of the existing emojis, but absolutely hate using custom emojis that don’t exist in other platforms. In other words, I love custom avatars of emojis on platforms and apps, but not custom emoji altogether.

@manton I am with you. Grumpy Gen Xer’s unite!

Emojis should be interoperable, consistent and work across the open web!

@manton emojis add a lot of complexity to “plain” text. I imagine if they were invented today we’d just use HTML w/ `<img>` tags .

@manton Custom emoji have a different function than ‘regular’ emoji, imo. They let different communities make little bespoke connections, meaning, in jokes, what have you. Need that for communities to thrive.

(People do that with regular emoji too, of course. Like 🧢 meaning lie, 💀 replacing 😂.)

@futuregeek I need a “Grumpy Gen Xer’s Unite” t-shirt.

@bobwertz Ha 😆 That’s a great idea! I want one too!

@futuregeek I might have to design one. 🤣

@bobwertz Keep me posted. I was thinking the same thing!

@manton that’s actually something I wish Fediverse devs could collectively put their heads together on… there’s got to be a way to make “fed-synd” emoji.

@manton -- that's a form of lock-in and damn right it's bad.

@manton This has always bothered me too, to the point I’ve considered dropping emoji entirely.

@dave @manton Couldn’t agree more, that’s exactly what it is.

@dave Yes, I don't think it was intentional lock-in but that's the end result. I'm experimenting with a change to display these custom emoji, but I'm not going to create them because I don't want to make the problem worse.

@manton -- i probably would do it too. :-)

@manton I’ve accepted them in the moment I realized I could make custom color variants. Like green, blue and yellow rotating lights (that only I ever User but hey 😅)