HAPPILY IMPERFECT

Bye bye Gravatar

I’ve had my Gravatar account for a long time —18th January 2017, something I managed to find by exporting my data and querying the JSON file included (which only gives the UNIX timestamp)— but I’m about to close it.

Why? Because it serves me no purpose. At BEST it was a quick way to get my details added to a comment box on some (WordPress mostly) sites, but at some point in the last few years it changed to only populate the URL, that is normally asked for, with a link to my Gravatar profile, rather than to my blog. Which, for me, makes it utterly useless.

Genuinely intrigued to hear about any other use cases that might be actually useful —I already have my own presence on the internet so I don’t need a ‘digital passport’ as they now claim to be— but I can’t think of any reason to keep this, so I’ll be deleting the account soon.

I wonder how many other accounts I have floating around that serve no real purpose anymore? I am finding more and more as I go through my passwords to de-google those (removing my gmail from the accounts), as well as many services/websites that no longer exists. Such is the price of being on line for over 25 years I guess.

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3 responses to “Bye bye Gravatar”

  1. Dan Q avatar
    Dan Q

    Your Gravatar will also have been used to show your image alongside your comments on various other blogs; that’s kinda its original purpose.

    My blog tries to fetch (and precache; rather than letting each visitor hit gravatar.com and expose their IP to Automattic!) Gravatars corresponding to the email addresses people use on my comment form, for example. It’s kinda cute.

    But if it’s not there, I try other avenues. For indiewebbers, I try to fetch their face based on their site. For fedi comments I try to fetch avatars from their fedi accounts. For a handful of people I have pre-override ones set up. For the rest… I use Robohash… but I’m thinking of pivoting to a selfhosted variant of that (which I forget the name of!) sometime.

    But yeah… it’s still useful for avatars. The original thing it was good for!

    Reply
    1. Gordon avatar
      Gordon

      Yeah that’s a good shout. That is useful, but not useful enough I don’t think. I’d rather people got the link to my website than an avatar anyway (which changes over time).

      Reply
  2. Gordon avatar
    Gordon

    I hadn’t even spotted the AI Profile setting either – https://unattributed.cc/re-bye-bye-gravatar yikes

    Reply

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