Hot on the heels of a post I wrote 4 years ago, wouldn't it be useful to have a well-known URl for user avatar images? When I sign up to a web service, I don't want to faff around uploading an image to use as my avatar. I want that service to look at my […]
@Edent I really like this! Though I’m a huge fan of static sites (being able to serve them via IPFS for caching, sneakernets, and distributed access), so the query parameter part of your proposal would make it impossible to serve on my blog.
Though it’d break the WebFinger parallel, I’d rather have sites look for /.well-known/avatar/<sha256(email)> or similar (the hash to make it marginally harder to scrape indexable static sites for email addresses)
@Edent first of all, I'm admonishing you for use of twitter dot com in your example (it might exist as a domain, but not as a vector of change, progress, or positive outcomes). Secondly, while it "isn't WebFinger because that returns JSON", there's a yes but, one element in there can be a link to the image. Overall though, I like the concept. You have earned ② idea points with this submission.
@Edent
Kind of disappointed no one mentioned pavatar, which is this but based on a URL rather than a domain and account name, the same as favicons. https://github.com/pavatar/pavatar
@Edent What would be nice is a generic way for me to provide a set of data, including avatar, and possibly contact details, and so on, that I want to make available to some parties, and a means that they can update.
That way I would never have to tell someone a new avatar, or phone number, or address, or whatever.
@revk that's what the .tel TLD was supposed to be for. Put your contact details into DNS and let changes propagate through. That aspect of it never caught on though.
@Edent I wonder if giving a well-known url as you sign up is better, then you opt in to using that data rather than anonymous, perhaps even selecting what info you want used, ie perhaps more than just a profile photo.
I do like that gravatar supports multiple emails though and optional different inages for each, but all under one account. It does expose my email matches another account potentially though, which I may not want to share
@Edent I think the idea is cute, but some human factors might make it a bit risky for some users and (services?):
• A user may wish to ensure a particular service account cannot be tied to their main online identity. If they sign up to Twitter as @MyUsername and also as @anonymousconfessions with two different email addresses at the same domain, they may be deanonymized if the same unique (or otherwise matchable) image is set on both accounts.
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