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Abu Godot @abgd

I fantasized last night about an algorithm that converts instance names or even full handles to a small set of emoji to give each a unique fingerprint that takes up little screen space but allows instant visual recognition.
does anyone think this would actually be a good idea?

(This was, of course, inspired by @nolan and his use of :trumpet:.:coffee: to denote toot.cafe)

@abgd @nolan Doesn't work as well, and the in-joke is a bit more 'in', but I've been thinking of tooot.im as :strawberry::strawberry::strawberry:

@yair I've been thinking the same, lol!

@abgd The 'display name' Could possibly be used for that. One of many problems, though, is that it can contain only very few emojis.

@yair I haven't done the math yet, but considering how many emoji there are, I'm guessing three might be enough to encode a larger namespace than the fediverse would ever need.

@mux2000 @yair Well, I tried to do the math, I think it's actually about 176 million combinations. Could there conceivably ever be that many instances?

@abgd @yair Yes. It would have to mean that Mastodon will becomet the primary way by which the human race communicates, but if that happens, and the average instance only hosts a few people, it could. Plus bots and abandoned instances still running etc..

@abgd True, but many emoji are utterly useless and translating literal puns to visual ones is something that I think is way beyond any current algorithm and better left as an exercise for the :poop: :envelope: er.

@yair Lol my first reading of that was "poop mailer".
But I was thinking this system would forego the puns and just represent each instance name as a unique set of 3 or 4 emoji...

@abgd See? Even with toot.cafe it took me a while to understand what @nolan is referring to, and shitposting is relatively easy as well. Now who is the weird flag, highrise building and pause button?

If the number was small you could memorize them, but these are not very memorable or distinguishable sequences.