Yeah, straight-up reposting images in bulk like that is one of those crimes that people do thoughtlessly, but all over the place without even realizing it's a copyright violation, or not even caring that it is one.

The bot should be posting links to the comic pages and let mastodon's multimedia stuff extract preview images.

Anything other than that may be "convenient", but is ultimately entirely self-serving at the detriment of the people whose work the bot is using.

How do you feel about fixing that, rayalez?

Also, for anyone wondering why this matters, further reading from an incident last year: https://twitter.com/aurahack/status/902363519672360962 - https://twitter.com/i/moments/901869159931187200

Hi! Sorry, I wish I could do that, but the comics are taken from comics-related subreddits, and most of the links there are direct to images, they don't give credit to the author, so I can't do it automatically either.

I think a lot of the authors expect their images to be shared all over the internet, so they include a url to their site in an image.

Not everyone, and I understand that's not ideal. But the alternative is curating it manually (which I don't have the time for), or shutting it down (but many people seem to find it useful, so I figured I won't do that unless one of the comics authors complains).

If you want to help curating the comics - send me a message!

I can't amplify this enough, especially with creative products.