I feel like that's a different use case?

I post things to Imgur so I could reference them in posts on other platforms. I don't want the images tied together.

Pixelfed is an Instagram variant

I feel like using this for the sake of posting pictures to Lemmy would just clog up Pixelfed instances with things not even meant for them. Pixelfed is a community, not really an "image host", even though it technically has that capacity,.

Upvoted for the Fediverse and FOSS features, but if you're looking for a simple FOSS image hosting service devoid of any social features then also look up for any Lutim instance

• https://github.com/ldidry/lutim
• https://framagit.org/fiat-tux/hat-softwares/lutim

Some working instance (there are less and less for service being free and focussed on hosting images makes it a cost hard to sustain for any volunteer individual or association)

https://www.chatons.org/search/by-service?service_type_target_id=All&field_alternatives_aux_services_target_id=All&field_software_target_id=234&field_is_shared_value=All&title=

How do pixelfed instances even work. I imagine the storage requirements are crazy on a busy server.

Those services are seldom profitable. Especially as they get larger, their costs rise. Meanwhile, imgur, as a service that provides embedded content, has little opportunity to make money off of their users. They rely on infinite growth and ever more people investing money into them to keep financially viable.

But there is no infinite growth and imgur has reached its limits. Now they need to bind users to their platform and rely on ad revenue. So old content gets purged, along with nsfw content, in order to entice advertisers.

Catbox claims to keep files forever. I find this claim dubious, what's the catch?

catbox is more like a file hosting website but yeah, it's pretty good too.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The individual hosts of the Fediverse are limited on space, and jamming that limited space full of images, rather than using an external image hosting service, is worse for the sustainability of these spaces

Uploading directly uses server resources which are voluntarily provided, that's why using external providers and just posting links instead is usually better.

That's because you arrived when reddit already had its image hosting.
Before you could only upload a link, so you had to find a hosting site.
It'd be the same if lemmy didn't have one.
And in fact it's like that for me, I didn't configured pict-rs, so I can't upload images to my lemmy instance, I need to configure it or use a hosting site.