symbola replacement

[powettpt]

hi, since a long time I've been using media-fonts/symbola as my font for emojis/icons. I don't need extensive support for these, and the most basic ones suffice. symbola had pretty much the ones I need. I liked it because it was such a small package, specially when compared to noto-emoji. Now, with the masking of symbola, is there an alternative to noto-emoji that is not a massive package. I tried quivira, which does not support almost anything, and unifont, which either does not have the ones I want, or I could never make it work in urxvt...
when I say the most common ones, I mean like thumbs up, smiley, thinking symbol (a comics cloud is enough). These basics are probably enough for me, I just don't want to see blank squares all the time when chating...