Bots of this type have appeared recently, and people are asking if it's okay to use them. I'm not sure about this either, so I think it would make sense to ask users.
These bots follow some subreddits on Reddit and automatically post it to Lemmy when a post is created there.
I've seen an example site for it: lemmit.online. This instance is dedicated solely to mirroring Reddit posts to the Lemmy instance.
Maybe instead of mirroring to a community on Lemmy NSFW, we can subscribe to lemmit.online via Lemmy NSFW. This way we could have kept Lemmy NSFW free of bots. Currently, even if accepted, I believe it should be done under admin control to prevent duplicates.
Categorically no. The point of lemmy isn't to be a content farm. It's to be a community where people respect each other. How can you respect anything or anyone while stealing content?
In fact I would go the other way and start banning people that are posting content they don't explicitly have permission to post. In this day and age where more people are seeking to monetize sharing nudes, we need to protect the few free content creators we have left, whether on this platform or the former one.
That's a fair point but what about artwork? For example hentai. Are we really expecting only OC content to appear on Lemmy? I don't think that's realistic at all..
I would argue that we're no more entitled to post people's hentai artwork as we are their nudes. More so in fact, it can take days to create hentai, only for it to be posted here with no mechanism for the original author to request it taken down.
If people really want to see other people's hentai posted here, why not link to it? I'm pretty sure the original authors would appreciate that. Plus if they see Lemmy generating traffic, maybe they'll join up and post stuff here directly.
That's what sourcing content is for. All the communities I moderate require sources when possible, and proof of best effort when not.
Your suggestion would make hentai communities all but impossible for the exact reasons you already stated.
Linking only to an art page would make the communities functionally useless. People don't come to follow a million links, open a hundred web pages, and sign up for a dozen services in hopes of seeing something they like, they come to see the content, same as in any IRL content community.
Nude photos are cheap and easy to produce, so those communities would never be starved for content, but a hentai community that only allows direct images if they're OC would be dead on arrival.