You can add emojis to your posts in Mastodon, but the way you add them depends on whether you’re using the website interface or an app.
Using emojis on the Mastodon website interface
- Start writing your post
- Click the 🙂 picker icon
- Find the emoji you want either by searching for keywords or by scrolling through the available emojis
- Click the emoji and it will appear in your post (you can cut and paste it if it’s in the wrong place)
Using emojis on Mastodon apps
- Start writing your post
- If you want to use a normal emoji use the picker on your phone or tablet’s keyboard
- If you want to use a custom emoji use the picker within the Mastodon app, usually indicated by a 🙂 icon below the box where you write your post
They’re in two different places on apps because the on-screen keyboards on mobile devices don’t allow custom emoji to be displayed, so they have to be in a separate section in the app itself.
Typing emojis with a keyboard
If you’re using the web interface through a keyboard, you can also type emoji directly without using the picker.
What are custom emoji?
Custom emoji are additional emoji added by your server admin. People on other servers can see them, but only people on your server can use them. More info in the custom emoji guide.
How to set skin tone in emojis on the Mastodon web interface
Mastodon’s web interface includes an emoji picker, and you can set it to default to a particular skin tone:
- Click the emoji picker icon 🙂
- Click the ✊ icon next to the search box in the picker
- Choose the skin tone
The picker should now default to using that tone on emoji that support it.
I tried using the emoji typing shortcut but it defaulted to yellow. How do I get it to use the skin tone I chose?
There’s a known bug in the typing shortcut for emoji, where it ignores skin tone settings and just uses the default yellow non-tone emoji set. If you’re comfortable using Microsoft Github you can vote for this to be fixed by giving a thumbs up in the issue ⧉.