Emojli

The social network where your username and every message had to be emoji, built as a joke, closed eleven months later

Shut down
19902026

Emojli was a messaging app made in 2014 by the British YouTubers Tom Scott and Matt Gray, in which usernames and messages could contain nothing but emoji. Announced in June 2014 after the success of the one-word app Yo, it collected about 70,000 reserved emoji usernames before it launched on 29 August 2014. It shut down on 30 July 2015, with every account and message deleted.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2014
  2. 30 June 2014 other
    Emojli is announced

    Usernames open for reservation.

  3. 29 August 2014 Launch
    Emojli launches on iOS

    About 70,000 usernames already reserved.

  4. 2015
  5. 30 July 2015 Shutdown
    Emojli closes and deletes every account

The site through time

Browse emoj.li as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2014 2015 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Tom Scott and Matt Gray 2014–2015 Founded Self-funded; no investors, no advertising

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 70,000 29 August 2014 Reported Emoji usernames reserved by launch day

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Tom Scott and Matt Gray shut Emojli down on 30 July 2015, saying that keeping it running past its first year would have meant spending their own money on servers and support for a joke that had made none. They deleted every account and message on the way out rather than sit on a pile of personal data under UK data protection law, and said the app would not be resurrected.

Our analysis: Emojli was a joke that worked exactly as intended and was killed by its own punchline. The novelty was total: no text, no photos, not even a name you could type, which meant there was nothing to do once you had laughed at your own username. Every network needs a reason to come back the next day; a constraint is a reason to visit once. The interesting part is how it ended. Two people who owed nobody anything chose to delete the data rather than keep it, and published a post-mortem explaining the cost of running it, which is more than most funded startups manage.

History [edit]

No words allowed

In the summer of 2014 an app called Yo, which sent the word "Yo" to your friends and did nothing else, raised over a million dollars. Tom Scott and Matt Gray, two British video makers with a habit of building things to make a point, announced Emojli in June 2014: a social network where the only permitted characters were emoji. Your username was emoji. Your messages were emoji. There were no photos, no links, no text.

The joke landed. The announcement video went round, about 70,000 emoji usernames were reserved before launch, and people fought over the good ones, since a name like a single pizza slice was as scarce as a short Twitter handle. Scott wrote the backend in PHP and MySQL, Gray built the front end, and the app arrived on iOS on 29 August 2014, then Android. Emoji support in browsers and on phones was patchy enough in 2014 that a lot of the engineering went into making the pictures appear at all.

The bill comes

Novelty apps have a specific shape of failure: everyone joins, nobody returns. Emojli had that shape, and its makers had said from the start that they were not raising money, not selling data and not going to run it forever. In the summer of 2015 they announced the end, and on 30 July 2015 the service closed.

They did the shutdown properly. Accounts, messages and the lot were deleted rather than warehoused, which they explained partly as data protection hygiene and partly as not wanting to be responsible for a database of other people's conversations. They then published a post-mortem video going through what it had cost and what they had learned, and said Emojli would not be coming back.

The domain today

emoj.li still loads a single page for the app that is not there any more. Both founders kept making things; Tom Scott spent the next decade making one of the best-known technology channels on YouTube.

Similar projects

MySpace A place for friends 2003–now Friendster The social network that came first 2002–2015 Google+ The social network everyone was signed up to and nobody used 2011–2019 Yik Yak Anonymous, local, and impossible to moderate 2013–2017 Miiverse Nintendo's hand-drawn social network 2012–2017 Orkut Brazil's living room, built in a 20% project 2004–2014

Sources [edit]

  1. Emojli Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  2. Emojli, an emoji-only social network by Matt Gray and Tom Scott Laughing Squid 30 June 2014 [archived]
  3. An emoji-only social network: ridiculous or brilliant? Salon 2 July 2014 [archived]
  4. Emojli: new emoji-only instant messaging app ABC News 1 July 2014 [archived]
  5. Emojli was a social network where the only language allowed was emoji Boing Boing 14 June 2026 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).