I'm using Privacy Pass from Cloudflare to be immune to that.
Steemitimages was reliable and Steem was too. That's gone now.
Many people are censored by Steemit so I wouldn't be surprised that's their settings.
Personally I think that idea of independent platform is a step backwards that brings all old, well-known centralized troubles and gives no real gains.
That is true, but unfortunately we had to learn that a fully decentralised platform also brings many challenges. We were fully relying on Login Tools (Keychain, Steemconnect) and Steem nodes provided by the community and when most of these node operators shut down and left for Hive, our platform became extremely unstable. In that time we had a decline of almost 50% in daily active users (which we have more than recovered from meanwhile), a hard hit for a small startup like us.
At the same time Hive was not yet stable and in the short time window between the Hive announcement and launch it would have been impossible for us to migrate to Hive. We also had some concerns about Hive, which we hoped would be cleared up but weren't. E.g. some of our users never received Hive, because they (some claim accidentally) voted for the wrong witnesses and we're concerned about the legal challenges of launching our token on a DPOS chain since both Steem and Hive have the situation that the small group of people in control of block production came together and decided to remove or freeze user funds.
We eventually decided that becoming a semi-decentralised platform is the best compromise for now. That is essentially the same as most topic-specific dApps do (3speak, actifit,..): The API fetches data from a centralised database that is populated only from our API (as opposed to the Hivemind-solution we had before that was populated from Blockchain nodes only). Contributing to the "dApp" through other frontends is not possible. But, all content can also be posted to the Blockchain, from where other frontends can access it.
Just like e.g. Actifit we let our user choose whether they would like to post to Hive or to both Steem and Hive, but we also allow our users the option to post to no Blockchain at all - this makes it possible for us to let users sign up with once click with their Facebook or Google account or Email and then set up a blockchain account once they are familiar with our platform instead of overwhelming them with the whole Blockchain and private key stuff.
Allowing posting to both Steem and Hive was also the wish of our community - most don't care about the politics, some want to post to Hive exclusively and a few others only to Steem. We let them choose.