Emoji missing in emoji reaction notifications

[dahlia]

Site

dev.phanpy.social

Version

2026.02.04.2aa600d

Instance

hollo.social

Browser

• Microsoft Edge 144.0.3719.104 on macOS
• Likely affects all browsers

Bug description

Emoji reaction notifications show the text “洪 民憙（ホン・ミンヒ）@hongminhee reacted to your post with” but the emoji itself is not displayed. The notification appears incomplete with nothing after “with.”

Expected:

洪 民憙（ホン・ミンヒ）@hongminhee reacted to your post with 😿

Actual:

洪 民憙（ホン・ミンヒ）@hongminhee reacted to your post with 

To reproduce

1. Use a Hollo instance or any ActivityPub server that supports emoji reactions
2. Have someone react to your post with an emoji (either Unicode emoji or custom emoji)
3. Open Phanpy notifications
4. Observe that emoji reaction notifications show “reacted to your post with” but no emoji is displayed

Expected behavior

The emoji should be displayed after “reacted to your post with”, either as:

• A Unicode emoji character (for standard emojis like 😿, 🌏)
• A custom emoji image (for custom emojis like :blobcatthinking:)

Other

I've identified the bug in the source code. There's a parameter name mismatch in src/components/notification.jsx:

phanpy/src/components/notification.jsx

Lines 446 to 450 in 2aa600d

	text = text({
	account: <NameText account={account} showAvatar />,
	emoji: notification.emoji,
	emojiURL,
	});

phanpy/src/components/notification.jsx

Lines 60 to 79 in 2aa600d

	function emojiText({ account, emoji, emoji_url }) {
	let url;
	let staticUrl;
	if (typeof emoji_url === 'string') {
	url = emoji_url;
	} else {
	url = emoji_url?.url;
	staticUrl = emoji_url?.staticUrl;
	}
	const emojiObject = url ? (
	<CustomEmoji url={url} staticUrl={staticUrl} alt={emoji} />
	) : (
	emoji
	);
	return (
	<Trans>
	{account} reacted to your post with {emojiObject}
	</Trans>
	);
	}

Because the parameter is passed as emojiURL but received as emoji_url, the value becomes undefined. This causes:

1. For custom emojis: url and staticUrl both become undefined
2. The condition url ? <CustomEmoji .../> : emoji should fall back to rendering the text emoji
3. However, even the text emoji (":blobcatthinking:") is not rendered

[cheeaun]

I've made a untested fix so you could perhaps try it out on https://dev.phanpy.social/ 🙇‍♂️

3. However, even the text emoji (":blobcatthinking:") is not rendered

This seems a bit suspicious, not sure what happened here. It should at least show 'blobcatthinking' without the colons 🤔

[dahlia]

Still no emoji shows up at 2026.02.05.819e5e8!

[cheeaun]

@dahlia is it possible to paste the notification JSON payload here? From the screenshot, it does look like grouped notification 😱 which I don't think I tested it enough to know how it works. So technically should be two notification payloads?

[dahlia]

Here's from my current /api/v2/notifications?limit=20 API:

https://github.com/user-attachments/files/25112246/notifications.json

Here's the screenshot:

[cheeaun]

Thanks, this is very helpful.

Turns out there are two issues:

1. emoji_reaction as grouped notification (with notifications_count more than 1) is unexpected — Mastodon obviously doesn’t support this 😉. But I made it work (on my local dev):

   

2. The emoji is still missing because Phanpy checks for notification.emoji and notification.emoji_url keys, which I think usually appear for ungrouped notification payload. In your JSON payload, I see this:

   {
         "group_key": "22686eaf-a33c-4b76-ada5-03271c723fc5:emoji_reaction:019c2f7b-aff9-7a2e-8a7f-9e597def99c8",
         "notifications_count": 2,
         "type": "emoji_reaction",
         "most_recent_notification_id": "2026-02-05T21:28:43.737Z/emoji_reaction/019c2fb5-19d9-7c1a-a2fc-a11002c24785",
         "page_min_id": "019c2fb4-beec-70ec-a952-14af57c797d0",
         "page_max_id": "019c2fb5-19d9-7c1a-a2fc-a11002c24785",
         "latest_page_notification_at": "2026-02-05T21:28:43.737Z",
         "sample_account_ids": [
           "01929d7d-33aa-756c-955a-6f25ca589a08",
           "01903b1c-c02d-7a18-b0a8-243a44e9875c"
         ],
         "status_id": "019c2f7b-aff9-7a2e-8a7f-9e597def99c8"
       },

I don't see which emoji is used for the reaction or am I missing something? 🤔.