PieFed v1.4 (to be released very soon) will have emoji reactions on posts and comments. An emoji reaction can be a unicode character like π or a colon-delineated string like :piefed: which gets automatically converted into an image when the post/comment is displayed.
Setting a reaction uses the same API endpoint as casting a vote (and behind the scenes reactions are federated as Likes, for Lemmy compatibility) but with an emoji element added to the JSON payload.
Also when looking at a post or comment in the API there is an emoji_reactions element that can be used to get a summary of the reactions that have happened so far. Compare https://crust.piefed.social/api/alpha/comment?id=456791 with https://crust.piefed.social/post/84566#comment_456791 to see what I mean.
Do a GET on /api/v3/site to retrieve a list of all the custom emoji (the ones with :something:) that this instance knows about and to find what images to convert usages of them in emoji_reactions to.
So if you give an emoji reaction thumbs-down π, it will count as a like?
Currently, yes. I'll see how this plays out with people using it before adding special cases for some emoji. There's no technical reason why not to make it downvote...
I'm holding back on it because downvotes aren't supposed to be "I don't like this" or "this makes me feel sad" like an emoji is.
It may turn out that overloading votes like this is bad. But I hope it works because choosing an emoji is already lots of clicks so I'd like to avoid a extra click for upvoting.
If you do add it to work like that, you'd need to make it abundantly clear that a thumbs-down is a downvote. Or people will accidently downvote without meaning to.
I don't think it should work like that. It'd be a good way to express disapproval without downvoting, which is desirably used for spam/off-topic/hateful content (as it is mostly used on the fediverse).
Except that reactions count as upvotes, so I don't think it'd actually be a good way to express disapproval without downvoting.
Upvotes aren't really controversial though. One assumes if you give a thumbs up or a :100: that it counts as an upvote in itself, which is fine. But many other reacts may have more abstract uses.
I would prefer it not downvote. I donβt downvote content but iβll give someone a thumbsdown if theyβre being a turd.
Yeah, i think it would be even more confusing if certain emojis counted as downvotes.