tl;dr

• I want you to sign up for libravatar (click here).
• Associate your FAS_USERNAME@fedoraproject.org email with it.
• Upload a photo.. any photo.
• Give yourself a high-five.

The Longer Story

There's contention out there about the "unix philosophy"... but whichever side of the narrative you're on, the ability to compose our tools is a win! This is long-settled on the desktop and server; there are more tools than you can count. On the web, it's another story.

There are some things that almost every web application needs to do for which single-purpose web services have emerged (the analogue of single-purpose composable command line tools). Some examples:

• Authentication: openid
• Authorization: oauth2
• Comment threads: disqus
• User images: gravatar

If you're building a blog and you want comment threads, you just include a snippet of javascript and boom, disqus provides the functionality, hosts your data, and makes it available across blogs. Super useful for the developer and the user. Super easy for the developer and the user.

If you're building a social app and you want user profile images, you just include a one-liner and boom, gravatar provides the functionality, hosts your data, and makes it available across sites. Super useful for the developer and the user. Super easy for the developer and the user.

The big problem here is these services are proprietary software.

libravatar is the first free-as-in-libre entrant to the field that I know of. It works just like gravatar. It also supports federation via DNS. It is copyleft licensed under the AGPL.

About a year ago, we started to use gravatar.com for Fedora Infrastructure services. We wrote some utilities into python-fedora that would make use of it. This was a mistake and we have since replaced them to use libravatar.

However, there is only a tiny sliver of the Fedora Community that actually has their FAS_USERNAME@fedoraproject.org addresses associated with libravatar accounts. With more in place, it will flesh out and beautify the apps we currently have in development.

So, again:

• Sign up for libravatar (click here).
• Associate your FAS_USERNAME@fedoraproject.org email with it.
• Upload a photo.. any photo.
• Give yourself a high-five.

If you want to discuss further or have concerns or questions, feel free to chime in here on my proprietary soul-deflating comment service, or join us in #fedora-apps on freenode.