The entire notion that emoticons should be limited to what a committee approves (which is then mangled by corporate PR even further) is ridiculous. Just retvrn to images.
This. But more work is needed. I tried a bunch of Discord alternatives like Matrix but very few have a fun experience with things custom emoji images that really make a chat server feel like a home.
There are clients on Matrix that support custom emojii, such as Sable and Commet.
Neither are absolutely perfect, but I know people who daily-drive one of the other (or both, which is where I'm at depending on the device).
For the most part, now that Matrix is merging those Matrix 2.0 specs finally, and the 2.0 features are already out in the wild with excellent results, it has a really good base, and as expected we've started to see clients build more into the average-consumer space to pose as alternatives to both niche and mainstream audiences such as Discord, Whatsapp, etc - Which it just wasn't/isn't able to do on Matrix 1.x (legacy).
Did they give a reason why it was declined? Was it some bureaucratic "form not filled in correct" thing, or are they actually against the concept of it?
To elaborate: it should be plain obvious that not every Emoji proposal can be accepted even though all of them are correctly filed, as there would be too many Emojis there then. So there has to be some threshold, and that threshold is mostly stipulated by vendors' willingness to process new Emoji characters for designing fonts and updating softwares in time.
That list only includes suggestions that were seriously considered and voted on.
Since it's a vote, there is no single official 'reason' for rejection. If I had to guess: it would be confusing to anyone who didn't grow up with American TV shows.
They were grandfathered in, not voted on. Or rather there was a vote that resulted in adopting the character sets developed by Japanese telecoms en masse.
Weirdly this is in line with Unicode in general. Widespread (and not even widespread) historic use in say print results in characters getting included.
what's the connection to american TV shows? i'm only aware of the tinfoil hat through cultural osmosis i guess, something about shielding from radio waves
it's a popular image/byword/archetype for conspiracy theorists, idk if it's a common enough symbol to justify emoji inclusion. the submitted proposals probably have analyses of that though :p
Generally Unicode is for encoding all existing encodings/writing.
So you generally can’t add something because it would be cool or fun or useful, but only because it is currently in use and cannot be encoded by Unicode.
That's not at all the case. Unicode began as a standard for making things like string(':)') in to a single character.
Consider all of the languages it supports. Consider: ﷽ (which isn't an emoji, but the point stands) which is an entire sentence. It was already in use in certain places and unicode decided they wanted to support it, so now they do. Previously, one would have to type out the entire sentence in the original characters, but now it is a single unicode, just like u+263a () used to be alt+1 (). The emoji was already in use long before unicode existed, and in seeing it in common use, they decided to support it.