Instead of another Twitter-like, why don't we do something a little more like Misskey1 or Akkoma? (But, not Like That. Without the jank that's kinda inherent to Fedi.)

What do I mean by this? There's some great things you can take out of these. I kind of like the idea of a PDS being a community where you know your PDS-mates (instead of being like a suburban gated community where if you have neighbors on there, you don't know them.) How could we do this? The main idea I've had for this is making a "local timeline" like on Fedi, where it shows you all the posts by people also on your PDS.

A screenshot from Misskey showing custom emoji used both in a post and in reaction to a post. The post is a picture of Mt Everest with "Ways the mountain will kill you" in bold text. I wrote "Look real close, there's an SCP on the mountain" with a smug Konata emoji. Two of the reactions are of a terrified girl.

On both of those server softwares I mentioned, you can react to a post with a custom emoji, as you can see above. But on both of those, the custom emoji are per-instance. This means that, even though most of the custom sets are the same, they show up as different, and you can't join on if it comes from a different instance2.

An easy way to solve this would be to have some authority publish custom emoji sets for this social mode. It might be individual users3, it might be "PDS communities," whatever. But they publish the sets and you can subscribe to them. When you publish a react record, it links back to the set. (If this social mode supports legacy Bluesky posts, it might emit a like record at the same time as the react, linking to the react. This is how they accommodate Mastodon.)