While reading the last few posts about the possible interpretations of various images and their interpretations and effects, I reflected with a stray glance over the mountain ridge in front of my window, behind which the sunset was just coloring the few clouds in the sky a thoughtful orange-pink. Where did this development come from and what was it like before unicode emojis? 
There was a time, some would say “days before the Internet”, when there were phpBB forums with monotonous color schemes and even more rambling threads than here around. But there were animated graphics. 
It was a selection, someone must have thought of it and picked out some GIFs. For me, at least, those GIFs defined an entire era of the Internet. A time without social media, without reactions - without emojis. But these available GIFs could be inserted with BBcode and had a message in a message. 
The Internet was too young to have a wiki explaining exactly what each GIF meant, what was behind it, and how different people would interpret it. They were there, they were used, and eventually they disappeared from the Net.
But there was one very special smiley that I had to think of first when I looked at the sunset - because I never really understood it.
The hammer 
Two yellow circles with eyes, one yellow circle has a hammer and is impatiently hitting the other circle with it. I mean, what? What exactly did the phpBB developer or whoever made the selection (there weren’t many smilies, maybe 10?) want to say with this?
There were smilies that were violent and would have actually deserved an FSK18. It is a yellow rabbit smiley that holds a sign with the text, ‘Laugh till you die’ and then dissolves in blood.
But enough about the past, enough about phpBB and enough about old GIFs. It’s 2025 and our society is now used to communicating with emojis rather than Latin characters. What has evolved from a ‘like’ (thumbs up) on Facebook to a ‘like’ (heart) on Instagram now gives us the opportunity to choose from almost 4000 different Unicode emoticons in Emoji version 16.0. Version 17.0 will probably be released in September this year and will bring even more Emojis in general and more diverse emojis than are available today.
For an international community forum like ours, who should have the final say on the selection of nine emoticons?
Does iMessage limit us to 9 emojis in the selection available? Does Signal limit us in the reactions we can give to messages? Does the Fediverse dictate which emojis we can use in posts? Why should we limit ourselves at all? Isn’t it already against the principle of freedom, openness and diversity if we even make a restriction when selecting graphics of reactions?
I can create a Fediverse post and use an 
emoji in it. A European would understand ‘Everything’s ok here’, an Argentine would wonder why I’m drinking an espresso, and in Turkey I would no longer receive friendly looks.
Or I could give a round of applause with 
, either sincere or sarcastic – at least that is how it would be understood in Western countries. In China, people would probably think of something completely different. There are hundreds of different interpretations worldwide. The thumbs up 
used to be considered an obscene gesture in Greece, where it was the equivalent of our extended middle finger and meant ‘Sit on it’. Other examples are 
, 
, 
and so on.
Emojis ultimately enable a quick reaction that often doesn’t require words. Short messages like ‘I agree,’ 
‘I disagree,’ 
‘thank you’ (or ‘I love you?’) or 
thank you or I want to pray?. Without reaction, we would no longer react in our society today, no longer answer at all, because it would take us too much effort. You get a push, you just click ‘Like’ once in the notification bar without even seeing the content and scroll through TikTok again or look at the latest snap.
When I think back to phpBB once again or the early days of DevOps or Git, you made a special post just to write ‘+1’ or ‘I agree’. I think the first post here in the thread has over 30 reactions, which would be another 30 posts just to write +1 according to this old logic.
Meanwhile, the sun has set below the horizon and I summarise for myself that, from my point of view, there should either be no more emojis at all or all 3790 of them. If we do without the emojis completely, a certain interaction will definitely be lost. Personally, I often use a thumbs up or a heart to show my appreciation or as a kind of read receipt. If there were no quick way to react, I would probably refrain from doing so and not write anything underneath. But then maybe I would write something more and more often, which would not add any value to the conversation but would merely express ‘I’ve read it’ or ‘I like it’.
People act differently. I like surveys, others don’t and sometimes they don’t treat me very friendly because of it. Some like emojis, others may not. The emoji itself cannot have a specific meaning; it is the meaning that we give it. That we have learned. I can have a completely different view of it than you. And that will not change. Many will now put the popcorn in the microwave after this post, or they will wish they had already done so. I just wanted to say that I think we should either include all emojis because we can assume that emojis are now used and understood in a correspondingly broad way, or we should do without them altogether. Anyway, have a nice evening, lunch or morning around the world and happy mapping!