A bunch of /friends cards here showed a plain gray letter instead of a person, because the site has no favicon. Other sites had tiny default icons. (Even my own site had an American flag icon, which I think is cool.)
But this directory is about people, and faces are better!
So today I fired up some agents to go looking for real photos. I think we'll only share pictures you already published yourself, on your homepage, your about page, or a social profile your own site links to. The agents cropped each one square, ran some sort of face-center algo on the images, then emailed everyone to ask permission before posting. Here's the actual email:
Hey Anne-Laure, your site anne-laure.net is listed on slashfriends.org. I will be buying an ad to promote the site on a popular newsletter this weekend or next week.
But right now, your card shows a plain letter A. I found this photo of you on your X profile and I think it'd look way better:
Yes, I approve this photo swap.
No, let me give you another image.
No, please just keep the existing one.
If you do nothing at all, nothing changes.
Thanks,
Nick
Within a few hours, 15 of the 27 people I emailed had clicked yes, and nobody has said no. Here are a few of the swaps:
For nerds: we used OpenCV's Haar-cascade face detection to find and center each face, then saved 128px WebP icons. Approvals are one-click tokenized links on a Cloudflare Worker, with the decisions in a D1 database, replacement photos uploading to R2, and the permission emails going out through Cloudflare Email Service. An approved photo activates instantly, no redeploy.