First of all, musk gets NOTHING from people directly linking to the image hosting servers. In fact, it’s essentially stealing from him.
It’s not stealing if it’s willingly made available. If somebody doesn’t like hotlinking, their recourse is to return a 4xx HTTP response. Your claim leads to “ToS violations are criminal” sorts of arguments, and we shouldn’t go down that road.
The real problem with hotlinking is that the image could become unavailable or turn into something completely different without warning. Although I still hotlink sometimes out of laziness, I recognize that it’s better to save and re-upload.
I admit the “essentially” qualifier is doing some heavy lifting.
But you’re ultimately expending some miniscule amount of someone else’s resources in a way that they received no benefit, especially where the expected path to those resources (which you’re avoiding) do provide benefit.
It’s a razor edge either way. If you’re on principal avoiding using the resource out of fear of “supporting” because you could accidentally generate a fraction of a penny on advertising impressions or bump the stock price a trillionth of a penny due to contributing to a reported active user count, it should be clarified that in this way, neither of those things will happen. The opposite will. You’ll burn a fraction of a penny of AWS time.
And yah, there is a risk of content switcharooing. I think in the context of a content aggregator that is heavily engaged by recency, it’s not something I PERSONALLY would stress about. If it stays stable for another 48 hours, it’ll almost certainly never be accessed again via Lemmy.
It’s not stealing if it’s willingly made available. If somebody doesn’t like hotlinking, their recourse is to return a 4xx HTTP response. Your claim leads to “ToS violations are criminal” sorts of arguments, and we shouldn’t go down that road.
The real problem with hotlinking is that the image could become unavailable or turn into something completely different without warning. Although I still hotlink sometimes out of laziness, I recognize that it’s better to save and re-upload.
I admit the “essentially” qualifier is doing some heavy lifting.
But you’re ultimately expending some miniscule amount of someone else’s resources in a way that they received no benefit, especially where the expected path to those resources (which you’re avoiding) do provide benefit.
It’s a razor edge either way. If you’re on principal avoiding using the resource out of fear of “supporting” because you could accidentally generate a fraction of a penny on advertising impressions or bump the stock price a trillionth of a penny due to contributing to a reported active user count, it should be clarified that in this way, neither of those things will happen. The opposite will. You’ll burn a fraction of a penny of AWS time.
And yah, there is a risk of content switcharooing. I think in the context of a content aggregator that is heavily engaged by recency, it’s not something I PERSONALLY would stress about. If it stays stable for another 48 hours, it’ll almost certainly never be accessed again via Lemmy.
At least that concern is valid.