I am writing an ReactionRoles-Discord-Bot in Python (discord.py).
This Bot saves the ReactionRoles-Smileys as UFT8-Encoded. 
The type of the encoded is bytes but it's converted to str to save it.
The string looks something like "b'\\xf0\\x9f\\x98\\x82'".
I am using EMOJI_ENCODED = str(EMOJI.encode('utf8')) to encode it, but bytes(EMOJI_ENCODED).decode('utf8') isn't working.
Do you know how to decode it or how to save it in a better way?
The output of str() is a Unicode string.  EMOJI is a Unicode string.  str(EMOJI.encode('utf8')) just makes a mangled Unicode string.
The purpose of encoding is to make a byte string that can be saved to a file/database/socket.  Simply do b = EMOJI.encode() (default is UTF-8) to get a byte string and s = b.decode() to get the Unicode string back.
Print an UTF8-encoded smiley