But then, if anything happened to that service (downtime, billing, ending of free services, etc etc), the images could be lost.
If anything happens to the instance you are uploading them to, they’ll be gone as well.
My personal opinion is it’s much better to offload images into a service meant for images. A lot of lemmy instances are put on very small servers, with very small resources (including drive space). It’s not fair to the owners of those instances to upload a bunch of large images to them.
There are plenty of options out there for image hosting. https://imgbb.com/ or https://imgbox.com/ seem to be highly recommended.
You mean Racknerd correct?
They are great, I have a couple of servers with them (including the one that’s hosting my lemmy instance)
I self hosted precisely so I can federate with who I want to. It’s nice to be able to see posts from multiple instances of (for example) self-hosted on different servers within my own instance, and comment on them directly within my own instance.
The only issues I’ve had is the comments can take a bit to federate across, but that’s to be expected.
I just wanted to add, in the official lemmy documentation they say to use a third party as well, not the instance itself.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html?highlight=images#images-and-video
This also served as a good reminder to look into disabling image uploads on my instance. I can’t afford a massive server for it to host other peoples images which is both size and resource intensive.