> How do public fish images relate to favicons and the Federated Wiki flag?
In all three cases, the goal is the same: to create a small, standardised image that gives visual identity to a public presence (whether that’s a person, a website, or a group).
These icons function as lightweight, recognisable symbols of identity in shared digital spaces. Our aim is to unify these ideas, using public fish images as both visual identity markers and carriers of embedded cryptographic data.
However, there are some constraints. Favicons are very small (32 by 32 pixel) graphic that appear in places like the browser’s address bar or the Federated Wiki interface. At that scale, it’s hard to make an image that is not only visually appealing but also uniquely identifiable among millions of others. When you view many of them at once, they can easily become cluttered or indistinguishable.
Federated Wiki addresses this with an elegant system: each site’s icon is just a colour gradient, simple and consistent, which allows hundreds of them to sit side-by-side in a visually harmonious way. You can see an example in the roster below:
Myth Garden Sites REFERENCES myth.garden/myth-garden-sites
We want to build on that simplicity while enriching the image with more meaning. Our approach is to embed metadata (for example a public key), directly into the image file. This means each Fish Icon wouldn’t just look unique; it would also *be* functionally unique, encoding a cryptographic identity that could be recognised, verified, and shared across applications.
The visual icon could then act like a "super-powered emoji": lightweight, expressive, and technically useful. You could click on the tiny favicon or wiki flag to preview a larger, more detailed image of the fish. And because it’s all embedded in the file, this same image could be reused across websites, apps, and messaging platforms—linking your visual identity to your cryptographic presence, and even verifying digital signatures made using your corresponding private fish.