BIMI and well-known avatar

last updated: Mar 18, 2024

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 username@example.com
  2. In a similar way to WebFinger, the service makes a request to:
    - example.com/.well-known/avatar?resource=acct:username@example.com
  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

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