vole

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Draw avatars with DiceBear instead of by hand

97f77001eed76cc287aeba532c4d670488121a18 · Keenan Nemetz · 8d ago · parent ca098f62

Draw avatars with DiceBear instead of by hand

The marks this package drew itself were a design I kept losing arguments
with. Avatars are now DiceBear's Shapes style, which is what the request
asked for.

DiceBear is JavaScript and Vole is a Go binary, so the split is: the
server renders the account's initial on its Everforest ground, and an
embedded bundle replaces it with the mark when the page runs. The
initial is what a browser without scripts keeps, so nothing depends on
the bundle arriving; the seed is the account name, so the same person
draws the same mark everywhere; and the ground is read from the element,
so vole.css remains the only palette.

The bundle is core 9.3.1 plus Shapes 9.4.2 (MIT code, CC0 design), built
with esbuild and committed like the other vendored scripts: 18KB, 5.5KB
gzipped. Its source is scripts/avatars-entry.js, and the licence files
beside it are inventoried in NOTICE, so the verify workflow's licence
check keeps passing. No request leaves the instance and no avatar is
stored.

Two details worth naming. Each mark gets a unique clip-mask id, because
SVG ids are document-wide and a directory page holds fifty of them. And
the RDF metadata block DiceBear embeds is stripped: it is identical for
every avatar and its licence is in NOTICE, so repeating it in the DOM
would be weight without information.

docs/accounts-and-access.md +7−5

@@ -29,11 +29,13 @@ commented on, and the repositories that work is in. Retiring an account keeps it
	29	29	page, marked as no longer active, because every closed issue and merged change
	30	30	still refers to the name.
	31	31
	32		Every name is drawn a mark: a single curled stroke on one of seven earthy
	33		grounds, derived from the account name and nothing else, so the same person looks
	34		the same on every page and between visits. The instance stores no image, accepts
	35		no upload, and calls no avatar service. It is decoration, not an identifier; a
	36		name is what identifies an account.
		32	Every name is drawn an avatar from the account name, using DiceBear's Shapes
		33	style and the Everforest palette. The mark is drawn in the browser from a script
		34	embedded in the binary, so the same person looks the same on every page and
		35	between visits; the instance stores no image, accepts no upload, and makes no
		36	request to an avatar service. Until the script draws the mark the page shows the
		37	account's initial on its ground, which is also what a browser without scripts
		38	keeps. It is decoration, not an identifier; a name is what identifies an account.
	37	39
	38	40	What a profile counts is not public. Every number and every event is limited to
	39	41	the repositories the reader may open, so two people can see different totals for