Oddbean new post about | logout
 It's not a single character, it's a full alt emoji, if you're seeing just : it's because you're truncating it expecting a single char. They usually are something like this :smiley: 
 That makes sense!  I think that is the correct answer.

: 
 Or maybe it's a ":)" or ":-\" or similar.  But yes I'm only looking at the first character. 
 life is what you make it. 

i associate : with associations 
 the event should have a tag "emoji" with a url to use instead of the text 
 I see that now. I looked at the full statistics of all reactions in my database and I don't even see a single ":)" they are all custom emoji reactions as you say.  I didn't know custom emojis changed the core reactions NIP-25, I thought it was confined to NIP-30.  So anyhow now I'm going to render them as □ instead of : rather than try to suppor it.