Next release of Mastodon will allow admins to post important announcements to their users, and yes, those are reactions

#mastodev

Okay let me be clear here, those are reactions to announcements. I didn't mean to say reactions would be available for normal posts. Not at the moment. This is not a committment to add reactions to everything down the line though. More of an experiment.
But yes of course you can react with custom emoji, come on

@Gargron have you considered not making them publicly visible - as in the discussion of how many followers and being a contest? Then it would still be useful, but not be a barrage of x number of people said this.. but those other people said that.

and are you going to have separate sounds for each one? *boop* 😺