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glitch-soc / mastodon

A glitchy but lovable microblogging server
https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Inter instances emoji usage #2049

Open goliv04053 opened 1 year ago

goliv04053 commented 1 year ago

Pitch

Use other instances emojis on your instance. Example: Discord let's you use other servers emoji on other server (in the case of Discord you have to pay Nitro but in our case it will be free)

Also let the user choose which "server emoji pack" wants to use. Example: I choose Mastodon(dot)social and other server emoji pack, it will be available to me only those packs and if I want to add more "emoji packs" I can choose or change.

Motivation

I have friends in other instances and their emojis are also interesting. It would be interesting if we could use each other emojis.

Plastikmensch commented 1 year ago

There are a few problems with that: The first and most obvious: licensing. While most custom emojis are either CC0 or CC-by-SA, some instances do commission their custom emojis. I don't think the admins and the artists would be too happy about everyone just being able to use it. Some might, some might not. So now, you need some kind of control structure like "this emoji can be used by everyone". Next is moderation hell for admins. For simplicity say you have 100 users, each using 20 custom emojis from other instances. That's already 2000 custom emojis that have to be moderated. Some of these, admins don't want on their instance. So, you'll also need some control structure for admins to blacklist or whitelist emojis from other instances. Then there is the technical aspect of this. You somehow have to store custom emojis for every user with this feature. Either as a local copy from other instances or as reference. Which either means taking up space, or hitting other instances with media requests.