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

Note that this functionality is not meant to share large images or videos, because that would require too many server resources. Instead, upload them on another platform like PeerTube or Pixelfed, and share the link on Lemmy.

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.

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.

They aren’t third party. They are buying Google Domains and all of the customers that come with it. If you don’t like it, don’t continue to use them. It happens every time a company gets bought out, the customers are part of that package.

And people wonder why I prefer forums. The “Discordifcation” of everything is out of control.