I’d say Instagram, and more generally big social media, is more of a marketing tool than an image sharing one these days. Networking with others is probably even secondary. My main issue with them for sharing or hosting images is usually the heavy compression and huge recency bias. They aren’t great for archives or really even discovering things from more than a few days ago as old content sinks fast. There’s not a good way to send someone to an album of specific images for example either.
The Fedverse tools are similar and have some of the same pitfalls but without the outrage baiting algorithms and ads. I ran a GNUSocial instance many years ago. Also tried hosting a PixelFed instance in 2019 or so and it was such a moving target I wouldn’t trust updates at the time to not send me back to square one. Not sure how it is now.
If your goal isn’t attracting clients or going viral you’re probably better served by Flickr or a self-hosted solution like Piwigo. I’ve had a Piwigo instance around for a while and ran Gallery2 and before that. It’s old school but heavily tunable. Flickr is probably the best third party service for actually hosting photos IMO if you’re not into hosting it yourself.
