Add your own custom Mastodon emoji

If you've been hanging out on the fediverse for a while, you've undoubtedly seen custom emojis. Folks would add one, more or a whole lot to their posts or profiles.

Normally, you'd have to reach out to your instance admin to have an image added as a custom emoji. However, if you're self-hosting your instance, your totally free to do so yourself. Isn't that wonderful 🤩!

To do so, you can head to Settings > Administration > Custom emojis (it's at `admin/custom_emojis` on Mastodon) or the equivalent for your fediverse server. Click the upload button and then define the image and short code for the new emoji. That's all!

If you're feeling creative, you can also design your own emoji. For that, I recommend you follow this excellent guide by Laura Kalbag 👨‍🎨.

While exploring the Custom emojis section of the admin panel, you may notice that it contains a lot more emojis than the ones you've uploaded yourself. That's because Mastodon would cache emojis from remote servers when it discovers them in federated posts. You can make these emojis permanently available on your server by selecting them and clicking Copy.