Libravatar is a free and open source service that anyone can use to host and share an avatar (profile picture) to other websites. Read on for some news about the service and its relevance to the Fedora Project.

As defined in the project’s blog, The Libravatar project is part of a movement working to give control back to people, away from centralized services and the organizations running them. It addresses a simple problem: putting a face on an email address.

The project originated from the will to have a free, as in freedom, service alternative to Gravatar, giving the users the possibility to use a hosted service or to run their own instance of the service and have full control of their data.

In April 2018 the Libravatar project announced that the service will be shutting down. The service is/was being used by many communities like Fedora, Mozilla and the Linux Kernel to name a few. The announcement triggered a big response from the community, of people interested and willing to help to keep it running.

After some coordination, and a complete rewrite of the application the launch of the new service was announced Tuesday 19th February 2019. The Fedora Project is proud to sponsor Libravatar by providing the infrastructure needed to run the service.