BIMI and well-known avatar

TIL that there is a spec called BIMI that is supposed to allow you to pair a logo with your URL via DNS. Unfortunately it costs more than a thousand dollars to sign up and doesn't work that well, so nobody uses it.

In semi-related news, Terence Eden proposes .well-known/avatar:

When I sign up to a web service, I don't want to faff around uploading an image to use as my avatar. I want that service to look at my email address or social-sign-in and automatically pick up my preferred graphic.

Here's how I see it working.

1. A user signs in to a service with the email address [email protected]
2. In a similar way to WebFinger, the service makes a request to:
   - example.com/.well-known/avatar?resource=acct:[email protected]
3. If the request's Accept header has a MIME type of image/*, then the server immediately returns an image.
4. If the request's Accept header has a MIME type of application/json, then the server can return a WebFinger-style document with "rel":"http://webfinger.net/rel/avatar" and, perhaps, a list of different images, formats, and sizes.

Both links via mastodon