Yes pretty much most fediverse instances are run by voulenteers on their own hardware time and dime. That is why donations are so important to keep these instances going. Storage space is not cheap and multimedia hosting requires a lot of it.
I have had a good experience with Post Images so far. The free accounts are more than enough space. And they provide a direct link to the image for posting.
I had a lot of trouble with this site, if I were to direct link to the image then it would be in low resolution and it says I have to link to the website instead of the image for full resolution.
I’ve seen a lot of issues with Imgur links, Imgur also tries their hardest to not provide you with a direct image link, instead preferring you link to the Imgur page which is not ideal.
Just looking for a simple drag and drop image host that will give me a plain image URL. No frills needed.
I think it's going to be critical for Lemmy instances to use a third party image service for one simple reason: takedown requests
Basically, there's no way that small server admins can handle the volume of takedowns that comes to every service. Having that handled by something like Imgur is the only way I can see things shaking out. It'll still be hard
imgur is the absolute worst on mobile and no I don't want to use your shitty app to see an image. Stay as far away from it as you can.
The only reasonable alternatives are things that give you a direct link to image. I used pixhost a few times and it was fine but I'm happy to find alternatives.
I've never had any issues using Imgur other than for some reason even a direct link to an image will take someone else I am sending the URL to to a framed page instead of directly to the image.