As for me, no worries, I do not use free services, I like to check what happens to my photos ... I pay but I am free ...
Nicolas, we are of the same generation, so allow me a bit of (gentle) sarcasm.
<sarcasm>
Are you suggesting that people set up a personal web site? You must be of last century. Nowadays, people don't even know where the browser is on their smartphone and you expect them to enter a url? What will you suggest next, that people use myspace or geocities, maybe?
What are you? Some kind of anarchist that still believes in a free Internet? Sorry, but that war was lost over 10 years ago.
When one wants their family and friends to actually see their pictures, they post them on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. Although the latter is probably only suitable for female photographers, with implants.
</sarcasm>
But, since we are from about the same era, I will explain.
About 15 years ago (July 2003), I got myself a private web site. I still have it. It has some pictures of the time and still manages my main mail address.
At the time, private web sites came with transfer fees, therefore posting a picture on the Internet came with the risk of running an uncomfortably high bill. I did not want to use my own site for that.
Later (2010), I bought a Sony A900. There was a lot of discussion about the quality of lenses at the time and I had an idea: just take pictures of the horizon, slanted to go corner to corner and post them. It is a simple procedure that anyone can do, it does not require an optical bench and is a lot less likely to give false results than photographs of a test chart (don't ask how I know). I started to post dozens of pictures of popular lenses. My hope was that other people would feel motivated and post pictures of other lenses: a collaborative effort.
At the time, flickr was the only site that allowed to post full resolution pictures for download without transfer fees. I paid for their "pro" account to get that capability.
The project was a complete failure. People used the pictures (especially on Chinese forums), but nobody felt that they could do the same project. I got a few thank you notes and several times more criticism that I should have done it a different way, that comparison was difficult, that the light was changing between pictures, etc... All what online photographers apparently want is that a tester assigns a single note to a lens to know if "IQ is good". Eventually, I took the pictures offline, but they are still on my flickr account. I'll remove them before the end of the year.
Note that I do not regret the exercise: I learned lots about lenses and I learned lots about human nature and the Internet. You should really click on that "we lost the war" link (hint, hint...).
Be insured that if flickr deletes all my pictures, I still have them. As to the pictures I posted on several forums 10 years ago, why should I care? Nobody else does.