Honestly matching the intent of an emoji to the contents of a post is a pretty big ask for a system that isn't using some sort of AI to process it.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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There doesn't need to be a fancy hardcoded solution like that, if only reactions would be have its own page history would help moderators, and like @MxRemy@piefed.social asked, whether they are removable by moderators
That would definitely work.
Are they at least removable by a mod?
Emojis are implemented as votes, not comments, so no.
Fun fact: all emoji reactions are UP-votes, even the puky one 🤣.
@OpenStars @MxRemy wait what? all emoji reactions are upvotes? that makes 0 sense
Yes they are. See https://slrpnk.net/comment/19752322.
@OpenStars very strange decision
Iirc the development was just whatever could most easily be accomplished, and then once that's out, the rest becomes less urgent and offers diminishing returns in exchange for additional effort.
One crucial detail is that ~99% of all Threadiverse users are on Lemmy rather than PieFed (conversely, >99% of Fediverse users are on Mastodon rather than either, or Friendica, nodeBB, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.). So part of the decision I thought was how to structure these so as not to break Lemmy - like if something is neither an upvote nor downvote, how would that affect Lemmy users?
Tbh I wasn't deeply involved in making this feature so the last point there is my attempt at a hypothetical scenario by way of explanation, which may not strictly speaking have been an actual valid consideration - or rather I am saying that my words here are not all that precise.
Many features on PieFed are unpolished like this. Additional contributors and/or funding would he necessary to flesh them out more. Like hashing out an agreement with Lemmy how their side of this would work. And I suppose with Mastodon as well.
I just want to point out that Piefed has skyrocketed in users this year. When you look at users active (comment, vote, or post) in a given month, you're talking about 7k Piefed users vs 35k Lemmy users. Along with Mbin's 1k MAU, that makes 7k/43k or about 16% of active Threadiverse users are on Piefed.
I'm only saying this to point out how awesome Piefed has done at attracting and retaining users this past year, going up from 1700 to over 7000 in 12 months. Lemmy lost 2k MAU in that time, so overall the Threadiverse is growing 🙂
@OpenStars while I love to see all these new features being worked on in Piefed, the fragmentation of how things end up actually working ends up making the fediverse ecosystem that much more confusing. I don't think there is too much of a solution to this other then more and more hashing out of details as we go. But I would love to see more micro standards/agreement across the threadiverse / fediverse / all these things that are not just trying to do mastodon...
I mean... understood, but I am not a PieFed dev, just passing along the info about emoji reactions.
Though PieFed devs will read your reply in this community.
It is always a balance between moving ahead faster vs. going more slowly and stably. Rimu the main PieFed dev put out a poll asking the community which style it preferred for 2026 and iirc by far the answer was more features. Perhaps 2027 will look different, but this is what people asked for.
Also, have you ever personally tried to converse with a tankie? I've never gotten DMs of such a hostile tone from literally anyone else across the entire Threadiverse except tankies (I literally just got one today - I made zero invitation to slide into my DMs btw, and especially did not appreciate the sea lioning tactics that are so transparently juvenile, regardless of the user's physical age). By far their "debate-bro" / incel mindset where telling them "no" means that they simply need to push forward all the harder is NOT a fun experience. And as a bonus if you block them they just come back with an alt, plus if you block the entire instance then they simply choose another and continue. So I for one am the last person that is going to tell Rimu that he needs to wrangle a consensus out of the Lemmy userbase before proceeding with anything (their devs have never anything but respectful at least, yet everything gets discussed in the open and the sheer volume of absolute disinformation coming from the devs main instance... which does not get removed by the admins, is quite "off-putting" to say the least).
However, at least in the past, before a lot of the said disinformation campaigns recently, Rimu used to be quite open to feedback. I can imagine some pushback though: like say hypothetically that you make the downvote and the vomit emoji as downvotes, while leaving everything else as upvotes. In that case, what about other emojis not in that list, like ⛔🚫🙅❌📴❎😑😶🙉❎🛑🙊? No matter how complete you make the listing, someone could always be confused by let's say a newly added emoji? So a system would need to be designed - perhaps a red slightly tinted background shading (which needs to account for both light and dark modes, as well as be compatible with all Themes) for downvotes and a green tinted one for upvotes? Except that not everyone uses the PieFed browser web UI, so anyone using any kind of 3rd-party app is still not going to be aware of which emoji translates to which type of vote...
And here I was even assuming that they could be switched in the first place with some emoji reactions being one type of vote while others are a different type, which seems reasonable enough to me who doesn't do anything remotely resembling this style of coding, but in practice could be hellishly complex?
If people want this feature, then someone has to do the work to make it. You can also put in a feature request in the PieFed codeberg, if you want someone else to do it, but I am not sure how highly prioritized it would be (or as we are doing, talk about it in this community).
That's a good question that I don't know the answer to, BUT mander.xyz is a lemmy instance so the mods there can't see the reactions even if they can remove them.
I can agree that it might be a good idea to remove some of the more antagonistic emojis from selection. However you can't necessarily enforce that on other PieFed instances.
Or repport & ban the account for homophobia.
I think both should be disabled on the feed. People should go to a post to vote, react, or comment.
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