avatar #

avatar is a small service that fetches your Tangled avatar (org.tangled.actor.profile) from your PDS and caches it on Cloudflare. It uses a shared secret AVATAR_SHARED_SECRET to ensure requests only originate from the trusted appview.

Set PLC_DIRECTORY_URL to resolve DIDs somewhere other than https://plc.directory, which a self-hosted network needs.

It's deployed using wrangler like so:

npx wrangler deploy
npx wrangler secrets put AVATAR_SHARED_SECRET

placeholder gradients #

When an actor has no avatar on their PDS, the service generates a light, multicolor gradient placeholder. The gradient is derived entirely from the actor string in src/gradient.js, so it is deterministic and needs no storage.

To explore the generator, run the playground:

pnpm playground

Then open http://localhost:8787/playground.html. It renders live previews at the real avatar sizes and a gallery of random actors.