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There are a lot of blind people on here, who use screen reader software to tell them what is on the screen. To help screen reader users, it's a good idea to use emoji rather than old-style smileys.
For example 
(Some old-style smileys do work with screen readers, but most don't. Emoji are safer.)
If you're interested in accessibiity, I strongly recommend following @weirdwriter
p.s. Sorry, I didn't phrase original post very well, just want to make clear that @weirdwriter helped with creating this tip which is why I recommend following them!
@feditips@mstdn.social I didn't think about that. Thank you for the tip!
@feditips @weirdwriter Congrats on the shout-out man. LOL
semicolon closing parenthesis
@feditips Sadly not true, that is read as happy face with open mouth and squinting eyes, veyr long and time consuming. They actually really slow us down
@feditips @weirdwriter I never thought about that. Thanks for sharing
Good counsel, as we are used from you, @feditips 
But, to pick a nit: Is the reasoning correct?
A standard emoticon like the one in your example is a plain humble unicode character. There's no HTML tag with an alt attribute, characters simply do not have alt texts. Its images and other media that do. The "smile" is added by an English screen reading software.
It may be different when people use custom emojis provided by their server instance. My choice: I generally don't.
@weirdwriter
@feditips @weirdwriter I'm happy to use emoji vs. old school ASCII smileys!
But just FYI, my version of VoiceOver reads the emoji in your post as "grinning face with smiling eyes" -- which is it's official name, I think?
EDIT: I just realized - I think the "title" and "alt" tags are being confused.
Agreed. @feditips , here is the HTML that Mastodon web used for a unicode emjoi:
< img alt="
Mastodon presents an image, and sets the image alt text to the unicode character. You're probably seeing the image *title*, which browsers show on mouse-over or long-press.
But when it's a custom emoji, which doesn't have a unicode character, then the alt text and title are the same.
@feditips @weirdwriter
IMO this is a bug (or missing Obvious Feature) in the specific screen reader software
@feditips @weirdwriter
That’s cool, didn’t know that 
@feditips @weirdwriter xD works just as intended with a screen reader, the true fraternity emote.
@feditips @weirdwriter Wow. I never would have thought that a picture would work better in screen readers than text! 
@Blort common emoji are technically text: the text encoding currently used almost everywhere (unicode) includes the characters for a lot of writing systems, plus a constantly increasing set of emoji, and there are fonts to turn them into pictures.
custom instance emoji are different, but usually they come with an integrated alt-text (even if it's not always very useful).
@feditips I didn't know this! Good tip!
@feditips @weirdwriter this is a bad habit I have to break.
is Colon D as good a rapper name as i think it is, or am I just tired after a long day of #gardening?
@feditips @weirdwriter Agree with this comment!
@feditips @weirdwriter thank you for this information
@feditips @weirdwriter TIL that emojis are read out by screen readers as their expression! Thanks!
@feditips @weirdwriter A bigger problem was that my screen reader read the whole message in Swedish. There is no indication of the language used.
When I instead switched to the web page (I’m normally using an app), it read the emoji as “grinning face with smiling eyes” (but the Swedish equivalent) followed by “image” (in English), “smile” (in Swedish) and finally “smile” (in Swedish).
So the official web page of this message presents the emoji as an image rather than text. Why?
@feditips @weirdwriter The whole pronunciation without comments was “flinande ansikte med leende ögon
image
smile
leende”
@feditips @weirdwriter I have to say that in this particular situation, it is the screen reader’s responsibility to read out emoticons correctly. They have been in use for decades, and there is no excuse for screen readers not to recognize any but the most arcane of them.
@feditips @weirdwriter Actually, that was a programming choice. Which emojis? Which emoticons? Always a choice.
@feditips @weirdwriter Thanks for this advice! I'm still stuck in the grumpy old Internet community who thinks that these newfangled emojis are but a nuisance (only partly joking 