Add support for Unicode/Emoji 15.0

[catgirldoll]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Unicode 15.0, released September 13th 2022, contains Emoji 15.0. Twemoji has not yet updated to Emoji 15.0.

Describe the solution you'd like Twemoji should be updated to Emoji 15.0, including adding all new emojis. Existing emojis may need to be altered to accommodate this, such as blue heart being shifted to a darker blue so as to reduce similarity with light blue heart.

Describe alternatives you've considered Shake my phone when sending astonished face, so it looks like shaking face.

[jdecked]

I'd love to give y'all v15. We had it ready internally last week. I got laid off today, though, so I have no idea when you'll be getting this. I've asked my now-former coworkers to go hit release for us; I hope at least one of them is able!

Thanks to everyone who's given me a smile through this project – and everyone who's used and loved Twemoji just like I have. It was fun while it lasted.

[catgirldoll]

I'd love to give y'all v15. We had it ready internally last week. I got laid off today, though, so I have no idea when you'll be getting this. I've asked my now-former coworkers to go hit release for us; I hope at least one of them is able!

Thanks to everyone who's given me a smile through this project – and everyone who's used and loved Twemoji just like I have. It was fun while it lasted.

I'm really sorry to hear that. Thank you so much for your years of work on a project I personally love. Here's to this injustice being a gateway to your future success and happiness <3

[ryleu]

I am incredibly disappointed that you got laid off. I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Twemoji is my favorite emoji pack.

[Sqaaakoi]

I'd love to give y'all v15. We had it ready internally last week. I got laid off today, though, so I have no idea when you'll be getting this. I've asked my now-former coworkers to go hit release for us; I hope at least one of them is able!

Thanks to everyone who's given me a smile through this project – and everyone who's used and loved Twemoji just like I have. It was fun while it lasted.

That's really sad to hear, I just got linked here from a Tweet (which was crossposted from Mastodon, as a consequence of Twitter's new management) and I also wanted to share my support for you and the project. I hope you and everyone else who got laid off can somehow continue working on Twemoji (contributor maintained fork?), as it's one of the most highly used and popular emoji sets. Unicode 16.0 will probably cause a lot of issues for everyone (especially Discord, as they're one of the most significant apps that use Twemoji) who is using Twemoji, as there will be no "official" update to Twemoji which will mean that new emoji might not be available on some apps and services.

TL;DR: Thank you for developing Twemoji, and I hope you'll be able to continue, potentially with a fork as it's an extremely significant emoji set.

[jdecked]

tl;dr: "everyone on the project" has not been laid off. this project is a design & engineering partnership and the designer is still there. I'll fork this only if: a) someone else can create the assets; and b) it's confirmed by my design partner that there's no internal ability to keep this project going.

Also, if Discord would like to hire either of us to work on (Tw)emoji, I don't think we'd decline 😉

the long version: If it's any consolation, after I posted that comment, I was able to track down Jason Sofonia (the Twemoji designer, AKA Sofo) and find out that actually he didn't get Thanos snapped out of Twitter. So that's at least some good news: he is at least as passionate about Twemoji as I am and has repeatedly fought internally to keep it alive; not everyone who worked on Twemoji is now laid off (i.e. that Tweet is wrong!). I'm the person who did all the GitHub stuff, but behind the scenes it's been teamwork 100% of the way.

That said, I don't know what Twitter is going to look like as a company over the coming months. Twemoji hasn't gotten anyone's full attention for many years now (or possibly ever?) – any update, anything on GitHub, etc has always meant that two people who care stuck around after work that day/week to make it happen. Given the internal turmoil, I would completely understand if Sofo decided to do other things with his time or if he needs a breather before rallying people to put out another version.

Figuring out what happens to Twemoji is unfortunately not as simple as one person waking up tomorrow and deciding to keep going. Twemoji was in an interesting state internally because we were getting ready for the redesigned emoji to be released, in addition to updates for this open-sourced vector version which we planned to keep. I'd bet most of the people who worked on Twemoji (vector or new style) are not only not there anymore, but it's completely unclear who is still there (if you've been following the news, you may have perhaps seen that some people don't know who their managers are and there isn't an accessible org chart!). And even before Twemoji comes everyone's day jobs, which are no doubt in a similar state of "which of my colleagues still even work here? Am I going to get fired tomorrow on a whim?"

Even if Sofo wanted to keep going with Twemoji, there are also practical concerns that will take considerable time to be sorted out – for example, I'm pretty sure he didn't have GitHub push permissions and I'd be willing to bet that anyone who could give him GitHub push permissions has either been laid off or gotten their own permissions screwed with enough that their usual method for granting GitHub permissions may not even still work. I'm sure it's something that can relatively easily be sorted out, but practical concerns like these still consume a non-zero amount of time.

There are many pieces to pick up before one person can decide to keep going – and while I'd be willing to help with a fork, I also don't want to conflict with Twemoji main if, after all the pieces are picked up, it turns out it lives on. To be clear, any fork couldn't just be me alone – this project has always been at least 1 (incredibly competent) designer paired with at least 1 engineer. Sofo has made new assets magically show up in my Slack DMs after the release of every Unicode version and in return I've made twitter.com not break as we shipped the new assets to prod (there are way more steps to that than one would think).

I get that this is not a particularly consolatory comment, or even a comment that reflects the urgency that anyone waiting on the next Twemoji version may feel – but it seemed like a more detailed, nuanced explanation was necessary.

[CyberFlameGO]

Thanks so much for explaining, and thanks for developing Twemoji; good luck with your future endeavors!

[catgirldoll]

As a small update for those here: it appears sofo was laid off or quit around November 17th[1], 4 days after @jdecked's latest comment stated he was still at Twitter[2]. It would appear Twemoji has lost its designer.

As Twemoji v15 was ready internally at Twitter around the end of October[3], we can still hope for a release with Emoji 15.0 support, but either way it looks like Twemoji as we know it may well be dead.

[wdym-lmao]

Spotted the new emoji designs back in February.

[ncfavier]

Stuff seems to be happening at https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji/issues/8

[JeDaYoshi]

Cool, I'm glad for you; but there's no need to spam everyone who has notifications enabled to this issue with nonsense.

There were multiple comments of @Aidanboyishere spamming the issue with emojis and random nonsense. Now that seems like the account has been banned, I don't want to look as if I was talking to myself.

[justanthonylee]

Comment

Grow up. Forced to leave this repo to stop the alerts! The project is literally abandoned at the moment so spamming random people is just messed up.

[justanthonylee]

Cool, I'm glad for you; but there's no need to spam everyone who has notifications enabled to this issue with nonsense.

Hey hello

Hey does anyone have access to kick this user? It’s a new account and at this point is just spamming messages.