Save avatars of "Followers" Block locally

[jaschaurbach]

What

The avatars of the users in the Followers block are not saved within WordPress but are loaded every time from the instance.

I would love to have them cached locally and only update every now and then.

Why

Because I think this is the right thing to do with data from other instances. Not hitting every time the other instances when someone opens my blog is quite nice

How

No response

[janboddez]

Possibly related (at least in spirit :-P) to https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/568.

But also, I share the feeling. In fact, I already do store commenter's avatars locally, using a custom code snippet (which can be seen near the top of my "add-on mu-plugin").

Now, I'm obviously not expecting anyone to use my code there (which relies on the presence of another plugin to work, by the way). But, who knows, someone might feel inspired. ;-)

I may look into extending my "solution" to followers' avatars.

There's also other plugins for that do this sort of thing, I think, for "regular" commenters; no clue if they can somehow be leveraged to do something like this.

[jaschaurbach]

For the avatars in the comments (regardless from whe3re they are coming) Avatar Privacy does the job very good.

Unfortnuatly it does not detect the avatars in the follow block.

[jaschaurbach]

Maybe it is a good idea to reuse the code for storing avatars you wrote for the webmention plugin @pfefferle?

[janboddez]

Had a quick look in the database and I don't think the avatars are stored anywhere, but rather that the icon.url property which is stored in the postmeta table is used for rendering the block (and the follower avatars in WP-Admin).

At least for comments, we can hook into one of WordPress' core hooks and store avatars anywhere (and retrieve them, again using a hook, later on).

For these followers, maybe the best way would be to make the Follower::get_icon_url() method filterable? Then we could (write a plugin to) store the corresponding avatar locally and return its URL if the file exists (or save the local URL in postmeta and fetch it from there), overwriting the "default" URL returned by the plugin.

(Of course avatars would have to be updated every once in a while. What I currently do, for comment avatars, is check whether they're over a month old, and update them if so, even if nothing's changed.)

Another way would be to override the block's render function (seeing as it is a dynamic block). But that's more complicated; you'd need to get the URLs from the block's original output HTML. And it would only work for the block, not elsewhere (like inside WP-Admin).

Not saying this is how is should be done; just generating ideas of how one could attempt to make it work with what we have right now.

[Menrath]

From my point of view this is also a privacy issue. I think this is also related to https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/622 I also almost started working on this weeks ago.

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