Update (2018-07-31): Libravatar is not going away

Update (2019-03-04): the IRC meeting logs were moved to IRC meetings

Here is a place where people who are interested in taking over Libravatar can coordinate.

Contacts / Offers of Help

Please leave some contact details so that others can reach out to you.

I can offer hosting, domain, CDN for free. showfom@gmail.com

Can we get some statistics about the service now? Both in terms of the infrastructure (assuming infra support won't continue) and in terms of what is required to keep it going? Do we know how many avatars are served? stored? etc? (bex@pobox.com)

I second this. I would like to see this service keep going if possible. How many servers are currently in production and what is the monthly cost to host them? I have over 15 years experience as a server admin including time in the hosting industry and would love to contribute. Email is wattersm@watters.ws

I also would like to keep the service alive. I can offer free hosting on dedicated ipv4 and ipv6. I'm currently trying to deploy a private instance of the project using docker. libravatar@kumy.net

I can offer free hosting for the service. smurf@debian.org

Stats

As of 2018-04-03, the storage requirements are:

  • Application server:

    • 1 GB General Purpose v1 Rackspace cloud server
    • Number of user accounts: 6655
    • Number of unique avatars: 6919 (355 MB)

  • Static image server:

For the month of March 2018, the traffic looked like this:

  • Application server:

    • Bandwidth: 328.31 MB in awstats (45 GB in Rackspace billing)
    • Hits: 43,823

  • Static image server:

    • Bandwidth: 18.99 GB in awstats (68 GB in Rackspace billing)
    • Total hits: 11,191,373
    • Redirects (to Gravatar): 9,605,127

Current stack

  • OS: Debian 8.11 (jessie)
  • Framework: Django 1.7.11
  • Database: PostgreSQL 9.4
  • Webserver: Apache 2.4.10
  • Queue: Gearman 1.0.6

Cost

The cost (currently covered by Rackspace through their OSS program) for the month of March 2018 was $70 USD:

  • Cloud Bandwidth: $13.50
  • Cloud Servers: $56.84

External accounts

In addition to the domain names (libravatar.org and libravatar.com), the following accounts could be transferred to the new team:

Basically I'm willing to help to keep this service up & running and would like to contribute a VM or some disk space and bandwidth by running a mirror. No Django experience though, but slightly able to read Python, but no programmer at all. Contact me at ij@2017.bluespice.org or @ingoj on Twitter.

Digital Ocean

DigitalOcean would be a good place to move this service. A couple of $10 droplets could easily handle the load. The question is who would you want to own the servers?

The email to reach out for potential DO open source sponsorship is opensource@digitalocean.com

They offered $200 to host two droplets for one year.

DO also ( I believe ) will contribute resources to open source projects that request it.

Has anyone formulated a plan at all to update Libravatar to Python 3 and migrate away from unsupported libraries? zach@mailcan.com

I have setup a new repo here: https://pagure.io/libravatar2 to modernize/rewrite libravatar to use the latest available tooling. Please concact me if you would like to help.

clime@redhat.com

I am here to help anyway I can, refactoring code, hosting. Please reach out sadin@fedoraproject.org

I published today a server-side implementation in C I started three years ago, available here: https://github.com/Aversiste/libravatar.cgi. It is a CGI program currently implementing the size, default and forcedefault flags with allowed default values of '404', 'mm' and 'blank'.

This is not finished and not a suitable replacement for the current stack as it uses the file system directly but it is good enough for self-hosting. I use it at https://avatars.bouledef.eu/index

I am available for any discussions related to the shutdown and the migration though - tleguern@bouledef.eu

I want to keep this great project alive.I'm the developer of the Mastodon client Halcyon which I took over when the original developer quit his work and deleted his repository.I successfully made it popular again and added many new functions so far.I hope that I can archieve this goal a second time with Libravatar.I don't know the server side languages used here (I'm an PHP developer) but I can modernize the client side and with the support of a great community who will hopefully pay for the servers I can also manage the hosting.I want to keep things open and I think it's bad when everyone has to change to the closed source Gravatar.Instead I want to keep an open source avatar hoster which hopefully will some time in the future federated.I'm always here to help - Email: ni.pos@yandex.com Jabber: bw5rws@jabber.lima-city.de Matrix: @nipos:avareborn.de And I'm also in the #libravatar IRC Channel which could be helpful for coordinating the future of this project.

@all, but especially to @clime@redhat.com. I've created a local repo on my Gitlab for the moment, rewrote most of the code for Django 2 and deployed a first more or less working copy to OpenShift. Questions, please don't hesitate to contact me at: oliver@linux-kernel.at Regarding the question about libravatar and Python 3. I didn't touch the lib yet, but that will also happen, yes. I think the first, important move, was to upgrade the backend to Django 2. Next is to modernize the frontend (I'm thinking about Bootstrap... And no, no Angular, React, Vue, ...). I really hope that nobody else is working on this and is as far as I am already. :-) Source code can be found here.

Catalyst Cloud would be happy to host a mirror - Andrew Ruthven, puck@catalystcloud.nz