Where I see Follower emotes working best is by giving your followers access to 5 of your existing sub emotes, and if they want the remainder, they would need to subscribe. It would allow them to get a taste of your library and still feel like a part of the community. However, the way it's set up now makes that complicated.

THE ISSUE: If you decide to make some of your existing sub emotes available to followers with the current system, you have two options: either you have to make a second version of the same emotes, or you have to move 5 of your sub emotes to be only follower emotes. Both of these options have problems.

Creating a second version would lead to, for example, a Love emote having to be Love2 emote or LoveF for followers. This leads to people who are both subs AND followers now having two versions of the same emotes.

Making the follower emotes separate from your sub emotes also has problems, as it makes those follower emotes ONLY useable on your channel and nowhere else, even if they are subscribed to you. This is incredibly limiting.

I've seen people say to just make the follower emotes useable everywhere, but this also has some issues. It basically forces subscribers to follow you if they want the remainder of your emotes. While it may seem like being a subscriber and being a follower should go hand-in-hand, the harsh truth is that some users may simply want to subscribe to a streamer for their emotes and do not care to watch them. By forcing them to be a follower to get the remaining emotes, they now have a channel on their followed bar that they don't care to watch.

THE SOLUTION: Simply make the follower emotes like a lesser sub. They are not new emotes, they just use five of your existing emotes, but they can ONLY be used on your channel. A subscription, on the other hand, allows them to use all of your emotes, including the follower ones, everywhere. Simple as that. Followers will now only follow because they care about your content and want to use some of your emotes during your streams. Subscribers don't have to follow if they don't want to as they already have all of your emotes and they can use them anywhere. There are no second versions of the same emotes.

The only potential downside to this is that you won't be able to make new emotes for followers, but in my opinion, it doesn't make sense to make follower emotes different from sub emotes. Most people will make their first five subscriber emotes the most representative of their community and the most used ones. Those should be the ones followers get access to, not some random off-kilter emotes that they'll barely ever use.

Hopefully this makes sense! Thanks for taking the time to read this.