@Michael Vogel
I found the bug.
the pure existence of the config value in the table ]system

cat: system
k: emoji_activities
v: s:5:"false";

fires the bug.
as you can see its set to false. no matter what value is in "v", the code always returns true.

so if you set the value via console you can only get back to no emoji_Activities if you delete that database record.

I will open an issue for that.