I recently read a funny comment and wanted to give it the 😂 reaction like I would on a Telegram post, but upvoted instead. Reddit had upvoting downvoting but wondering if Lemmy, being an open source innovative software, should evolve past the upvote downvote and allow for a wide range of emoji reactions to a post.
You got a lot of downvotes here which you probably didn’t deserve for a hypothetical question… From a technical perspective it is possible to implement reactions in ActivityPub, other fediverse platforms already have them. If you’re interested look at the *key family of platforms: Misskey; Firefish (formerly Calckey); etc. Some of them I think are already interoperable with Lemmy, though don’t quote me on this.
ActivityPub is a very generic and flexible protocol, you can implement almost any social media feature on it. From a protocol perspective any reaction would just be an activity, same as posts. The only tricky part would perhaps be making sure that you don’t break federation with other platforms.
Now, would it be a good idea to implement reactions in Lemmy? Honestly, I don’t think so. I don’t think emojis are inherently bad, but I don’t think they would add much to the kind of discussions that Lemmy is trying to host.