"Anymore"? I've never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don't even know how to do it if I wanted to.
I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I've never met another NoScripter in the wild.
Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It's only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.
Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that's the point, obviously. It's the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.
Me, personally, I usually don't need emoji seasoning. I'm fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that's just my lame opinion.
And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I'm always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They're not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it's written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn't quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I'm on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.
Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn't rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I'd use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.
For me, multimedia is a non-negotiable part of the web experience.
Yes, I get as annoyed as the next guy when I want, say, a simple tutorial written in a couple paragraphs, but the only ones anyone seem to want to make are eight minute long videos filled with fluff. That sucks. But purposefully excluding it from your protocol because it burned you a fee times is a gross overcorrection in my view.
I appreciate the Gemini project, I respect its goals, and I am happy that it meets the needs of several people such as yourself. But for me, and I think for a great majority of people who would be potentially interested in its broader goal of simplifying the web but are dealbroken by lack of multimedia capabilities, Gemini will never be anything more than a toy. A quirky little curiosity that will never expand beyond a tiny clique of people who accept Gemini for what it is and are content to only ever see content from that same small pool of people.
[aggressive ruler-slapping in the distance]
I thought that actually was the joke of this stunt, and he was being sarcastic. Was that not it?
Well, you know what they say. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it interested in learning about the water cycle to have a deeper understanding of why the river flows in the first place.