It has just come to my attention that Lemmy supports custom emojis...

![Trollface](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6c852190-b6f7-4f62-8c79-0b0703dafb9a.png "emoji trollface")

So they are just images, but TIL you can add hover text to images on Lemmy (hover text in quotes, alt text inside the brackets)

They'd definitely be the cutest emojis in the Fediverse! I don't know how much use they'd actually see, but if it's not too much work to agree on a set of emojis and add them, it'd be a neat little gimmick. If it's too much effort, though, I don't know if it'd be worth it. You could still use them though because, like cally says, they're just images, and the emoji tab is just a shortcut to them.