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’re showing up on my personal instance.
Things do sometimes take a bit to come across, and I tend to get a bunch of posts from a single instance come in at one. It does make a bit of a pain at times as I won’t see anything at all from an instance, then my front page fills up with nothing but posts from one community within an instance (that’s how I came across this thread).
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.