Every major backbone provider charges throughput, and it's not cheap. Infrastructure spanned across the country is a massive price. I never did understand web business models that offered "free" or "unlimited" bandwidth or storage, because at the end of the day someone has to eat the cost. The folks ordering mugs/t-shirts coupled with ads seems disproportionate to how much is consumed by the end users. Many companies are held afloat by investors, which to me always throws a red flag.
I never trust external services with my data. I've always hosted my own images. Some going way back to 1995 at the same owned URLs, along with local backups just in case. I've seen too many photo/social sites come and go since then. Even cloud providers have gone out of business without notice. Facebook will not be around forever, or at least their external linking structures may change, I can guarantee that. I despise how Facebook is trying to wrap the entire internet within its borders. Some people never escape those boundaries, and they'll end up either never learning knowledge outside of FB, or just asking the same questions repeatedly every couple months in the FB community because it's practically impossible to find useful content within their walls.
The great news is there's a big uptick in the youngest generation that have gone dark/underground (no social media anymore), or don't have FB because "It's for old people and evil big corporate status".
One thing that holds true is forums/bulletin boards are still the most efficient method for openly accessing and discussing information intended for a specific audience. It's a shame people gravitate towards vendor locked or less efficient methods. At least a forum will stay alive for as long as the interested community is willing to keep it alive.
