@ruari Hello! It’s definitely not our intention to erase existing uses of ⁂ :) It’s a great dinkus, it’s used in weather forecasting, and apparently can stand for “untitled”. In a way, that’s a sign that it’s been reused for different usages several times already.
@ruari Many symbols have, # are now for hashtags and chat rooms as much as they are for ordinal numbers, and they haven’t been used for weights in a long time. Here we use two @s, one for username (which comes from microblogging), one for belonging to a server (which comes from earlier computing), and we don’t use it for prices anymore. And most smileys re-use symbols :)
@ruari What I mean is that symbols can be repurposed without loosing the meaning of their previous uses, it’s all a matter of context!
As for proposing to Unicode, it’s not the way to go to propose a new symbol out of the blue. It only accepts symbols that are already widely in use with a clear meaning.
@ruari One good thing about the ⁂ (besides its look and the conceptual meaning we can put behind), is that’s its other uses are relatively nice and not used much in social media contexts. So we believe there is a space for it to be used with a meaning here without conflicting with its others. When I read a book and see a dinkus, I’m not going to thing “fediverse”.
@FediverseSymbol I read the book. Very much enjoyed it! I think it's over a decade old now? A second updated edition would probably be justified!
And I'll find his account ;-)