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.
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)
Dammit yes! Mandatory shot out to David Revoy and his replacements of it (and the blog post where he mentions how he divested himself of CDNs).
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.
Had a longer answer that went away for some reason 😭
Your criticism is fair, but:
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)