Change request: emoji reactions and votes
Leaving a reaction emoji automatically causes an upvote to be given to the post, even if I've already downvoted the post.
I don't know if this behaviour is intentional or a side-effect of the reaction not being a first-class supported feature of lemmy, but could this be fixed? It means sometimes I have upvoted posts that are objectionable simply because I left a reaction emoji on them.
Thanks!
Emoji reactions absolutely should not automatically register as an up vote, as many of them are negative. There either needs to be an option to choose up/down with the emoji, or a way to attach an emoji to a vote so it's clear what's happening.
I now need to go and remove reactions from certain posts that I definitely didn't intend to up vote.
That's because Piefed overloads the
Likeactivity to federate the emojis: https://join.piefed.social/2026/04/05/how-piefed-federates-emoji-reactions/This could be enhanced by optionally using the
Dislikeactivity or perhaps instead use the Pleroma-style EmojiReactions: https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey/issues/5425Edit: https://piefed.social/comment/9366765
Might be for compatibility reasons with the wider Fediverse?
Lemmy made an early decision to reuse "likes"/"stars" from Mastodon as upvotes and this comes with certain down-sides as they are really not the same.
Yep.
It's pretty awkward because of the issues OP raised but it was a quick and easy way to get something working with minimal breakage that would be fine 90% of the time. Sometimes that's good enough for a first attempt.
As a small project with minimal influence, building something that only works with other PieFed instances kinda dooms that something to irrelevance. If Lemmy ever adds proper vote-independent emoji reactions PieFed would switch to that method immediately.
It is definitely good enough as a first attempt