Some astute users of this site might've noticed that I turned on nodebb-plugin-reactions. That plugin allowed local users to react to other posts with emoji, but this lacked integration with federated services.

Additionally, titles and user display names containing emoji were often either stripped or reduced to their bare shortcode equivalent (e.g. :blobcat:).

As of the upcoming NodeBB v4.16.0, you will be able to natively see remote users' custom emoji in their display names, as well as send and receive emoji reactions in NodeBB. This is all handled by the Reactions plugin, which you can install yourself by running npm i @nodebb/nodebb-plugin-reactions@latest :tada:

More information below... [...]

We implemented FEP-c0e0: Emoji reactions, which was put together by @silverpill@mitra.social in order to document existing behaviour for Emoji Reactions in other software, namely Misskey, Pleroma, and Fedibird.

NodeBB handles both the explicit EmojiReact activity, and the fallback Like activity (with content/tag set as appropriate), and will show the reaction in the frontend UI.

A screenshot showing a blobcat and an applause emoji reaction

Likewise, sending emoji reactions is identical to before, with the same emoji selector as before:

An emoji selector element

... with the new addition that NodeBB will federate these emoji reactions out. Note that Emoji reactions are not supported in the Mastodon+forks side of the fediverse. You can send them out, but they won't receive them.

If you're worried about compatibility, switch the activity type in the plugin options to Like:

image.jpeg

Finally, as mentioned at the top, this is available only in the latest develop or upcoming v4.16.0. Installing the latest reactions plugin on top of stable v4.15.x will not magically grant you access to federated emoji reactions :wink: