Loomio
Tue 6 Jan 2015 3:52AM

Emoji Support

G 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 (😃). 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. 😉

BB

Brent Bartlett Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:10AM

I think that Diaspora should support the full Unicode set, if possible. I support this.

G

GP Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:13AM

I tested emoji support in diaspora* and it is… null for now.

For example, if I share "🐭", the Preview shows me the mouse (🐭), but after I send the message we lose the mouse!

Result: a nice, empty post. 😕

DU

Dumitru Ursu Tue 6 Jan 2015 5:53AM

https://github.com/dimaursu/diaspora/tree/emoji
Support for unicode emoji is in place. Only MySQL had problems with it, and they are solved now. Pods that used Postgres already supported them.
I'm working on the support for twemoji. It should be done today.

DU

Dumitru Ursu Tue 6 Jan 2015 5:55AM

Here is the mouse :P

C

Camil Tue 6 Jan 2015 8:53AM

Multumim, Dumitru, foarte tare ca faci asta, ma bucur ca exista si romani care se pricep la diaspora* pe-aici :-)

Thanks so much for implementing this, and sorry for the above message in a non-English speaking language ;)

DU

Dumitru Ursu Tue 6 Jan 2015 9:31AM

It's almost there, although I have to find the right hooks, so it will be efficient and the screen will always be up-to-date.

@camil yeah, I will try to bring more romanian/moldovan developers around here. It's a very cool project, it deserves more attention.

Feel free to ping me at dima ceata org, or on IRC, I would be glad to get to know you ;)

SVB

Steffen van Bergerem Tue 6 Jan 2015 10:43AM

We already have a thread about that topic: https://www.loomio.org/d/esJaABHn/add-smileys-support

G

goob Tue 6 Jan 2015 12:03PM

And github: issue and pull request.

G

GP Tue 6 Jan 2015 2:26PM

@steffenvanbergerem @goob … wtf.

Did you read my original post? Read it.

This is not about emoticon support.
This is not about smileys support.
This is about emoji support.

The Loomio and GitHub discussions are a mess about that. People are complaining that :) should stay :) and not become 🙂. WTF? That's not how emoji works. Can you do that on Twitter? No, and it would be bad if Twitter did that.

Some people seem to have issues with what they call "graphical smileys" or "emoticons", which emojis are not. Personally, I find that opinion irrelevant, because I think it is obviously better in a conversation to be able to see the emojis than to see squares like this: 💳 👻

(You shouldn't be seeing squares, by the way.)

You can make another discussion (like the thread @steffenvanbergerem shared) if what you want is, for example, to replace :heart: with 💗 just like GitHub does. However, I will not support your proposal.

@dumitruursu Oh my! This is exactly what we need. You're damn quick!

SVB

Steffen van Bergerem Tue 6 Jan 2015 4:23PM

@gp I read the introduction to this thread and I think that the goals are similar to the ones in the thread I mentioned. Both try to add support for additional ways to express yourself. @florianstaudacher said in the thread I shared

A separate input method for inserting the unicode emojis (= “text”) with a nice icon font that matches our design could do the trick.

and also others mentioned emojis there. The original post asked to

replace some common signs by smileys

but as I said there are also solutions that were mentioned in the thread.

Load More