Emoji Support
GP
Public
Seen by 237
I think diaspora* should support emojis.
Emojis are Unicode smileys that originate from Japan. They were popularized by their integration in smartphone keyboards. They are very, very popular and are quickly becoming a standard in smiley usage. In fact, the Global Language Monitor determined that the heart emoji was last year's most popular "word".
Read more about emoji characters on Wikipedia.
However, even if they are widely supported on iOS and Android, emoji characters are very poorly supported on desktops and on the Web. See an example here. You should not see squares.
To remedy this problem, developers created Emoji One, an open source collection of emoji characters that are embedded directly on the Web. Twitter did the same, and now share their emojis with WordPress.com.
I suggest that diaspora* should do the same. I find emojis cute, they are becoming an open standard and they are very efficient in sharing feelings over the network.
Are you a developer? If you are interested in this idea, take a look at this page and this page.
Warning!
I bet some people will assume that emojis automatically replaces traditional text smileys/emoticons like :) or :(
This is wrong!
As you read earlier, emojis have their own Unicode characters. For example, a grinning face is Unicode U+1F603 (馃槂). No need to setup something like a system that replaces :grin: with an image!
Oh, and you don't like emojis? Well emojis are Unicode characters, so not displaying them properly because you don't approve them would be censorship! Diaspora* users should have the free speech to spam their contacts with how many emojis they like. 馃槈
Poll Created Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:34PM
Diaspora* should support emoji characters Closed Tue 6 Jan 2015 8:56PM
The discussion trend indicates me that everyone agree that diaspora* should fully support Unicode.
However, further proposals will determine whether certain technologies should be used to display these Unicode characters consistently across all platforms. In other words, if @dumitruursu's work should be merged into Diaspora*.
Yes, I agree: The Unicode emoji characters should be replaced with visually-consistent, cross-compatible visuals. For example, "馃悽" would show a turtle on all devices and not only on Android and iOS smartphones.
No, I disagree: The Unicode emoji characters should not be supported by diaspora*. "馃悽" should stay an unintelligible square on desktop computers OR should be disallowed from the system.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Agree | 71.4% | 5 |
|
| Abstain | 28.6% | 2 |
|
|
| Disagree | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 259 |
|
7 of 266 people have participated (2%)
GP
Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:36PM
Emojis are now standard and in 2015, we now have the freedom and open source to make this innovation shine as free software.
GP
Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:39PM
Emojis are now standard and in 2015, we now have the freedom and open source code to make this innovation shine as free software.
Jonne Ha脽
Tue 6 Jan 2015 5:43PM
I would have no problem with including a nice font that supports these, I would not agree with replacing those with images. The proposal is unclear about what should be done.
Quetschwalze
Tue 6 Jan 2015 5:50PM
I think this is already state of the art and a lot of people are used to this!
Camil
Tue 6 Jan 2015 7:45PM
I think it's a very useful proposals, in many ways.
Dennis Schubert
Tue 6 Jan 2015 8:54PM
Yes for keeping the unicode characters, No for replacing them by images.
GP Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:59PM
Hell, we could even make diaspora* an emoji-only social network!
(That was a joke.)
Steffen van Bergerem Tue 6 Jan 2015 5:37PM
@gp Can you suggest a concrete icon font for emojis that would work well with our design? AFAIK that was the biggest problem so far.
GP 路 Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:26PM
@steffenvanbergerem But as I said, the discussions freely blend the different topics together. This Loomio discussion is focused on supporting emoji characters exclusively, not about input methods.
If you want, we can have a discussion on input methods later after diaspora* supports emojis. If it supports them, of course.