Future priorities

(Alternative title: ‘I accidentally created alternative social media infrastructure and now I need to work out the consequences’)

I released Mutant Standard in 2017 (it’s been 5 years, wow).

Since then, I saw my job with the project as creating these uniquely useful emoji, trying to give people tools to use them to the best of my ability and just seeing what happens.

Last year, I also surveyed Mutant Standard users and implementers to see what they do with the project and what they like the most about it.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the takeaways I have from these experiences and how I’m going to try to steer the project in the future based on them.

What happened

My takeaways from the years I’ve worked on the project have been this:

  • People like the project’s take on Unicode emoji as much as the non-standard emoji.
  • People overwhelmingly implement Mutant Standard through means that use shortcodes instead of codepoints.
  • People use a wide range of non-standard emoji that I have created, including ones that I assumed were more niche and even if they don’t use them all simultaneously.
  • My original expectation was that people would use Mutant Standard a la carte – but that mostly only happened in situations where people were constrained for emoji slots (like in Discord). What actually happened is that various Mastodon servers and projects that weren’t constrained ended up using the entire repertoire of Mutant Standard emoji – this has led to undesirable situations such as old versions of emoji remaining on Mastodon servers when I changed shortcode names and people using regions of emoji that weren’t meant for public use.

Other things that happened

Also things have happened in the years since I stopped working on the project:

  1. Mainstream commercial social media has kept alienating batches of marginalised users who try alternatives like Mastodon (where Mutant Standard has quite a strong presence).
  2. Elon Musk is currently burning Twitter to the ground, and the field of alternative social media has never been stronger.
  3. I’m getting enquiries from some alternative social media platforms about potentially using Mutant Standard.

So now what?

With these things in mind, here’s what I think would be the best use of my resources:

  • Create mechanisms for long-term stability; so admins, platforms, and users have an easier time staying up to date.
    • Maybe this would include having a two-track system: ‘Standard’ and ‘Experimental’, so I could have a way of experimenting and seeing what sticks while also enabling platforms and admins to work with tried and tested symbols. This is already slightly enshrined in the ‘extra’ category. I haven’t thought through all potential options yet though.
  • Create documentation and better packages for admins and platforms. For instance, there are various third-party emoji pickers that use the utils emoji folder. This was only ever meant for fonts (because fonts need all the characters of a ZWJ to function), but because there’s no documentation about this and all packages just included them, they wouldn’t be able to figure this out. As a result, there are modifier emoji in implementations when they don’t need to be.
  • Disseminate information for end-users on platforms such as Mastodon (where there is no instructive UI) about how to use Mutant’s special modifiers.
  • Keep improving and adding to Mutant’s repertoire of emoji, both Unicode and non-standard.
  • Create better documentation – currently I’m relying on old PDFs, which is not the nicest or easiest to update solution, especially now that I don’t use a Mac.
  • Stop working on things that are a lot of effort and don’t really increase usability and value for admins, platforms and users, such as PUA encoding and fonts.

Sunsetting PUAs and fonts

Origins

I had an idea very early on in the project’s life about potentially being able to somehow get emoji pickers on phones. This is where PUA (Private Use Area codepoints) made more sense but never fully made sense – not only would the effort involved in such an undertaking be huge and require more people, but PUA encodings themselves are fraught.

For instance, PUA encodings are always at risk of overlaps because they are non-standard by definition. Worse, they don’t provide OS-level accessibility, so they just wouldn’t be able to be used by sighted and blind people, which is unacceptable.

Fonts stemmed off from this idea of using the PUA encodings – create a font that enabled the display of these PUAs so other people could hypothetically create their own software pickers. It was an interesting idea and worth a shot at the time, but creating a font is really hard, and the results after a lot of research and work were buggy and unfinished, and the issue of screen reader accessibility is still largely unresolvable.

(Note: I never released fonts without an accessibility warning but I thought it was worth experimenting for a while in case this could somehow be resolved.)

The future of PUAs and fonts

I am definitely going to stop work on fonts because it doesn’t make any sense for me and how people use Mutant emoji. It’s too much effort and not nearly enough reward.

I am going to stop thinking about and adding to PUA encodings for now, but if they end up being useful to platform devs (eg. people who can make sure screen reader accessibility works in their implementations and that collisions aren’t an issue), then I will consider adding more.

The documentation and resources for both of these will still be around.

I will continue to make codepoint packages (although maybe I’ll eventually publish less on my end to match demand) and I will continue to put Unicode emoji codepoints in the build manifests. Even if codepoints are less useful as a distribution method, noting down all the codepoints makes my life a lot easier when making Unicode emoji (have you seen some of their emoji descriptions? lol).

You can also still compile your own fonts with the tools provided on the Mutant Standard build Github repo.