Support for Libravatar / ivatar

[patriciabt]

I’d like to suggest adding support for Libravatar / ivatar as an alternative to Gravatar.

Why Libravatar?

Libravatar is an open, federated avatar service compatible with the Gravatar API. It supports decentralised hosting and self-hosted instances, making it a good fit for the goals of FAIR:

Fully open-source

• Federated and decentralised by design
• Can fall back to Gravatar
• Aligns with FAIR's aim

Proposed implementation

• Provide an option in the FAIR settings to select one or more sources, with priorities: Libravatar / Local avatars / Gravatar / Custom URL
• Provide an option to allow or disallow fallbacks among the selected sources
• Allow specifying a custom domain for self-hosted Libravatar servers (e.g. using ivatar)
• Optional: Serve avatars through FAIR using an ivatar instance?

There’s a (very old) Libravatar WordPress plugin by GabSoftware that could serve as a useful reference or integration base.

Caveat: Privacy and fallback to Gravatar

One potential concern with integrating Libravatar is that it falls back to Gravatar by default if no avatar is found on the federated network. This behaviour could unintentionally expose user data (hashed email and IP address) to Gravatar servers without explicit user consent, which may conflict with GDPR or other privacy regulations. Ideally, the integration would offer a way to disable this fallback.

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I'm unfortunately not able to contribute code myself, only ideas.
I wasn’t sure whether to open a new issue or comment on the related issue #19 (“Support both Gravatar and custom avatars”).

Thank you for all your great work!

[Ipstenu]

This may be plugin-territory.

[cdils]

We need to confirm that FAIR Connect has the hooks and option to support other avatar services. Direct support shouldn't be baked into FAIR.