@manton so in the spirit of evaluation, something I kept thinking about through this thread is how categories/tags on blogs are already supported, already useful, and can be displayed or not. I think it could be valuable to have, not unlike emojis but with some broader reach, some Micro.blog set/accepted/determined taxonomies. Those taxonomies could be used in the future for feeds, human/machine curated or not curated, and Discovery.
Discover is great-- and I've clearly found people and blogs here. But there is value in filtering out things I don't want to see and browsing for more content I do want to see. Emoji feeds are great and a nice branded way to do that, but categories or tags can be more flexible in the long run. They don't have the junk character problem, and I don't see how they have any more of a spam problem than just posting anyway.
I'm not at all involved in this community, but look at the power and importance of tags in the fanfiction world as a community organizing and discovery mechanism.