Okay, I'm off to reading the wtf-8 spec, which might be what ssb accidentally uses. Quoting the first two paragraphs of the wtf-8 spec, to give you an idea of how great that would be:

WTF-8 is a hack intended to be used internally in self-contained systems with components that need to support potentially ill-formed UTF-16 for legacy reasons.

Any WTF-8 data must be converted to a Unicode encoding at the system’s boundary before being emitted. UTF-8 is recommended. WTF-8 must not be used to represent text in a file format or for transmission over the Internet.

Let us hope I'm somehow terribly wrong about all of this.