Nostr images can be hosted on any web server including your own.
Public service image hosting will not be forever free. To be sustainable they should charge tiny amounts of sats to guarantee quality of service.
This arrangement is very capitalist and properly aligns incentives to enable a decentralized network to be sustainable.
Ironically "people should pay for quality of service" was far more popular on Twitter than here. The Nostr community needs to get used to paying for quality if it is to remain decentralized in a sustainable manner.
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VC funded platforms have the privilege to provide free services until they can hold their customers hostage. If we are to defeat them we need a hybrid approach. Just like in a video game if things become pay to win people will leave eventually. Something along the lines of “pay to look cool” will be the answer.
There needs to be a NIP for clients to support hosted media on nostr. You should be able to just specify a compliant hosting service in your client, or host your own. The NIP could specify a simple interface for uploading media and returning a URL.
