AHEM, speaking on behalf of the IPFS Foundation, I can say that using kubo locally and fetching CIDs from a public gateway from the public DHT is slow and inefficient. This is usually what people mean when they refer to “using IPFS,” but there are many ways to recombine and configure the IPFS stack. At its lowest level, IPFS is a particular way of calculating content-identifiers (and a specific CID syntax)-- all the details about how that creates a key/value store, and a “distributed file system”, how CIDs are advertised and searches and fetched and cached and persisted, all of that is actually pretty flexible and configurable… if you have the time to invest. Which I would imagine most people don’t who already have 10 other cans of worms open working on a Fediverse server!
So, long story short, if you want to standardize on media storage… you might do well to start from content addressing and assess IPFS as one popular CID standard among others, bracketing off all the other stuff, because if IPFS-style CIDs are what you want, there are many options beyond the classic kubo/public-DHT configuration! including alternate encoding clients, k/v databases, etc.
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Separately, speaking only for myself, I would also recommend @shlee take a look at another SocialHub thread I just posted along related lines: