[yorwba]

I don't think Hetzner made a mistake. The author does not dispute that they published porn on their website, they only claim that this doesn't violate Hetzner's terms because they used a non-Hetzner CDN to store that content.

But Hetzner prohibits their customers from publishing porn, not just from storing it on their servers. If you point your browser at a Hetzner-hosted website and it shows porn, they don't care whether those files are stored elsewhere or not, porn website is porn website.

[kstrauser]

What that misses is that the author is hosting a Mastodon server, so those images don't even have to originate from their own website. If I hosted a porn account on my server and one of the author's users followed it, they'd see the images served from the author's server[0] even though that's not where it came from.

It would be like emailing porn to someone and then filing an abuse claim to their email host that their account has porn in it. Well, yeah, but they didn't put it there.

[0] This is the default in the Mastodon software, and it's a good thing. If one of my posts goes viral, my poor little server won't get flooded with O(num_followers) requests, but O(num_of_servers_with_followers) which is going to be a tiny fraction of the size. Admins can turn that behavior off on a per-server basis.