Emojery vs Avokado for Twitter

An extension that reads a site's DOM has a shelf life

Avokado last shipped in May 2023. X has been redesigned repeatedly since, and anything that finds the action row by matching markup stops finding it the day that markup changes. This is not a criticism of the code; it is the tax every extension in this category pays, and the only thing that pays it is somebody still shipping updates.

Emojery keeps each site's placement rules in a small adapter bundled with the reviewed extension, so an X redesign is a focused update rather than a rewrite. What happens when a site redesigns spells out that process.

A reaction count needs people in it

This is the hard part of the idea, and it is why 12 users is a fact worth stating rather than a jab. A reaction layer is only worth opening if somebody else reacted too, so the count and the audience grow or stall together. Emojery is in public beta and has the same problem; the difference is that its counts are pooled across 14 sites rather than one, so a reader arrives having already seen the layer somewhere else.

You cannot check a number you cannot see the working for

Avokado's card does not document who its counts include or how they are stored, which is ordinary for a small extension and still leaves you trusting the number. Emojery answers that differently on purpose: the counting rules are written down, every accepted reaction is appended to a public log, and a separate program re-derives the totals without contacting our servers. If it disagrees with us, it is right.

Open source is the part that outlives the author

No public repository is linked from Avokado's card, so if its author stops, the extension stops with them. Emojery is GPL-3 on GitHub: it can be forked, built and kept running by somebody else, and the license keeps a fork open too. The public record is a separate repository for the same reason — it survives whoever is maintaining the extension.