I was just looking around at the code for Lemmy and Voyager and I agree it's 100% a web frontend thing. Take this with a grain of salt because I'm not a programmer, just a long time tech guy, but it looks like Lemmy uses pict-rs as it's media backend and pict-rs has a configuration to transcode images into .avif to save space as of version 0.5.
I believe that AVIF is the preferred format on iOS devices? It's the still image version of AV1 (AV1 Image File Format) and it tends to have better quality per size than JPEG.
Unfortunately you're only allowed to do that if you're arguing that your (insert X vehicle here) should definitely have been able to take on (insert Y vehicle here) because of something in said classified documents.
Serious answer? Depends on if it seeds, I guess. Seems like they usually get people on distribution of copyrighted content, not just obtaining it for free.
I can't speak for everyone but if there was no capitalism and I needed for nothing I would seriously just go door to door asking folks if they had any computer/tech problems I could take a look at for them. Can you imagine how absolutely insane O'Brien would go if he had no problems to fix?
Woah awesome. Watching it now and this guy could have been on Star Trek, damn! He'd fit right in.