Using Gravatar as a Remote Profile

[Jiwoon-Kim]

Using Gravatar as a Remote Profile

Currently, WordPress profiles are synchronized from Gravatar.
From an ActivityPub perspective, this means Gravatar is the local instance, and WordPress is the remote one.

What I’m proposing is to reverse that direction — making WordPress the local instance and Gravatar the remote one.

At present, Gravatar profiles are tied to email addresses.
However:

Truth be told, there aren’t many email clients (meaning the app or platform your users use to read their emails) that support Gravatar. Most popular email services (like Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail) don’t. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do.
— [Gravatar Support](https://support.gravatar.com/avatars/email-avatars-are-not-showing/)

This represents a major flaw in maintaining consistency across WordPress.com accounts.

A Gravatar profile can have multiple emails attached,
and a single WordPress site can also have multiple user accounts registered with different emails.
However, when a self-hosted site creates multiple sub-accounts, only one can be connected to a WordPress.com account.

Here’s the problem:
If you create two accounts on a WordPress.com-hosted site using different emails,
then change your primary email on Gravatar,
your WordPress.com accounts will split, and access permissions become inconsistent.

Therefore, Gravatar should be based on the ActivityPub handle, not on email.

Of course, I’m not suggesting this issue can be solved directly within the activitypub repository itself —
but it must be discussed in the Automattic/wordpress-activitypub discussions.

[pfefferle]

Gravatar does not support ActivityPub and (as far as I know) there is no real practical way to delegate Identifiers in ActivityPub.

[Jiwoon-Kim]

My current assumption is that, in the WordPress.com hosting environment, all sites operate under a centralized user database, meaning they likely share the same wp_users table. This would explain why usernames and author IDs are globally unique across WordPress.com.

[Jiwoon-Kim]

@pfefferle

I’ve moved my main website to WordPress.com hosting.
Here’s my Gravatar profile: https://gravatar.com/kimjiwoon96
Handle: @[email protected]

In any case, the ActivityPub handle’s username is still tied to the Gravatar profile.

Automattic/gravatar#234

[pfefferle]

I am not sure I understand your issue? Gravatar is only used for Avatars in ActivityPub, so it should have no impact to the general functionality of ActivityPub.

[Jiwoon-Kim]

@pfefferle
What I’ve discovered is that on my self-hosted site, my author ID was 1, but on WordPress.com hosting, it’s 241264574.
Additionally, the username is tied to the WordPress.com account.

Gravatar profiles allow you to change the profile URL.
Currently, my username is kimjiwoon96, but since I originally signed up with my Google account [email protected], the original profile URL was kimjiwoon75.

When the Gravatar profile URL is changed, the WordPress username is updated accordingly.
https://designbusan.ai.kr/?author=241264574

[Jiwoon-Kim]