Open Heart Protocol

The Open Heart protocol lets an anonymous user sends an emoji reaction to a URL.

How

Set up an endpoint to receive an Open Heart POST request like this one:

curl -d '🥨' -X POST 'https://api.openheart.fyi'

A Open Heart message should contain of a single emoji sequence. However, the emoji sequence may be followed by arbitrary data which the server is expected to ignore.

This allows HTML <form>s to post reactions using the Open Heart protocol through an empty input. In this case, the payload will be 🥨=.

<form action="https://api.openheart.fyi" method="POST" enctype="text/plain">
  <button name="🥨">🥨</button>
</form>

Server code examples

UI

It’s a good idea to give visitors an easy way to send such requests; for example, with:

<open-heart>

Count

Optionally, a GET request to the same URL may respond with the emoji reaction counts.

curl 'https://api.openheart.fyi'

The response should be a JSON object mapping Emoji (as Strings) to their count (as Numbers):

{"❤️": 14,"🫀": 12,"🥨": 22}

If reaction counts are write-only, the server should respond with a 403 or a 404.

Questions

Why not `WebMention`?

This is much, much, much simpler.

What happens after POST?

The author of the endpoint decides.

What if the someone repeatedly sends emoji to my server?

It shows they may be quite enthusiastic.

What if I don’t want to receive some emoji?

Create a server-side allow list or disallow list and respond with a 400.