I don't think imgur get that much from you when you post a link directly to the image.
This is all there is on this page. The hexbear image is your profile pic.
This is what your link itself tracks. I feel like imgur gets no more than this with its direct link.
Obviously visiting the imgur page is another matter, there's plenty of crap there, and it's a bit of a pain to actually dig out the direct url. However I wanted to get the crosspost link from the place I took this meme from.
Yeah I mean I wish there was a good alternative. Your one seems to just mirror imgur, so you still need to go to imgur to upload.
At least now lemmy instances are generally hosting images themselves. There was a point where everyone got afraid of child porn and many of them stopped allowing hosting. Now, you can even copy the image and paste it into a comment and it uploads and does all the code for you.