this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Technology

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[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 29 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Bought by Automattic? After they non-consensually took all of Tumblr and hosted Wordpress to train AI? And after their big boss revealed his transphobia? I guess i'll skip this one

[–] Kissaki@beehaw.org 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Gravatar was a great, minimal, independent service. Until they acquired it and integrated it into their WordPress platform and onboarding (trying to get you to become a customer).

[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] Kissaki@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You link to an avatar generator.

What made Gravatar great beyond that was that you set it up with your email account, and other websites would use your chosen avatar,identified by email address.

[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago

Had a longer answer that went away for some reason 😭

Your criticism is fair, but:

  • Using the email as a seed on the generator goes halfway there, here's an example, although of course it could never change
  • Centralizing the avatar opens that service up to be grabbed for tracking like Gravatar did, or breaking the security of a site by injecting code without the consent of the site owner. The usual tradeoff between security/privacy and convenience.

Would be good to have a good user-managed way to do the same (well, beyond using an image on your own hosting, i guess)