(Note: this is not in any way an official statement by the admin team, I’m just a tech dweeb)

Proposal: Do Nothing, but improve searchability by making the shortcode autocomplete also search by tags, not just the canonical name.

We have the ability to add basically unlimited alt-names or descriptors to the tags for each emote, which has made searching in the emoji picker much more viable even for obscure emotes (provided they are well-tagged). Problem is, nobody uses the emoji picker, most people don’t even know it exists.

Make sure the library is reasonably well tagged and make that tweak to the searching and this whole conundrum goes away.

Examples below of some existing tags from a previous effort to tag all the emotes:

We might also want to make the alt-text more descriptive for people with screen readers but that’s a separate conversation

Edit: Oh it looks like a dev (comrade makotech222) has already chimed in on this below:

also, its maybe possible we can enhance the inline emoji window to use keywords as well. would have to do some experimentation with it.

 

secondary option if this isn’t feasible: remove the unicode emojis from the emoji picker so it goes straight to our custom emotes when opened, and make it more prominent in the UI somehow (highlight it in a different color, make it bigger, make it sparkle, idc). And still finish the job tagging them all

As others have mentioned, that was implemented in a hurry due to tightening up security and safety around embedded images. I’ve brought it up to the devs to hopefully rectify, as if an instance is trustworthy enough to federate with (aka, not actively malicious) then it is probably safe to show their embeds (behind a blur).

At the latest, this restriction will go away when lemmy upgrades to pictrs 0.5 which will support proxying image requests, but unless there are objections from the rest of the team we will likely add all federated instances to the image allowlist before then.

I really hope we can restore the old Active algorithm, it’s still on the table afaik, but I’m told the way that lemmy’s database schema works has changed enough that it isn’t trivial to switch back to.

yes! Movie night going on now at live.hexbear.net

HOW AM I JUST FINDING OUT WE OWN HEXBEAR.COM??? WHICH ONE OF YOUZE

surprise! we browse the trans mega!

sie/hir has been added, give them a shot!

New pronouns require a small amount of dev time to add, but it’s pretty easy normally. My bigger concern would be the ongoing rebase of our customizations onto lemmy 0.19.6. I’ve asked in the dev chat!

Working on this very site. So nothing cool, no

Yes, you are on the right track.

What actually happened is, for the migration back to upstream lemmy, our devs developed and contributed the custom emoji feature, so that we could keep them, but since we were uploading them through the UI not baking them into the app when it was built as static assets, they had to go into pictrs (the image backend), which doesn’t support SVGs yet. So as part of our migration we converted all SVG emotes back to PNG (apparently at a pretty substantial resolution).

They render correctly on our side because the UI recognizes that they are a local custom emoji and applies different CSS than we do for other embedded images, but as currently written, there is no simple way to differentiate a federated emoji from any other embedded image, so when federated, our emoji get rendered as just any image, at whatever size the file is. We will likely contribute a fix for this upstream, though resizing all of our emotes to a consistent size would also do the trick, and may be undertaken as a stopgap in the mean time.