this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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PieFed API & mobile app dev

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Announcements and discussions about the PieFed API - changes, improvements and general co-ordination between the frontend developers and the core of PieFed.

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Emoji reactions in the PieFed API (media.piefed.social)
submitted 2 days ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/piefed_api@piefed.social
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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 😍 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.

image

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.

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[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 6 points 2 days ago

Great addition !

[–] silverpill@mitra.social 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

@rimu I sent two reactions, one unicode and one with a custom emoji. The unicode one worked as expected, but the second one with :catjam: is not rendered properly. Also it seems to have replaced the unicode reaction.

[–] wjs018@crust.piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting. It shows up, but just as the shortcode:

emoji reactions

@rimu@piefed.social - not sure what the json looks like coming from mitra, but at least in the short term it might make sense to just have piefed interpret emoji it doesn't understand as an upvote (like it had been doing up to now) so that it doesn't break the UI like this.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Also adding :catjam: might be a good ideaβ€”it seems to be the ruling emoji of the fediverse.

Edit: I might have just missed it on account of the disco theme.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 1 points 1 day ago

I think there can be only one reaction. I added one, clicked another, and the previous one disappeared. After adding it back the second one's number dropped

[–] SolarBoy@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So if you give an emoji reaction thumbs-down πŸ‘Ž, it will count as a like?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 12 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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).

[–] chisel@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Except that reactions count as upvotes, so I don't think it'd actually be a good way to express disapproval without downvoting.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] teft@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

I would prefer it not downvote. I don’t downvote content but i’ll give someone a thumbsdown if they’re being a turd.

[–] SolarBoy@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, i think it would be even more confusing if certain emojis counted as downvotes.