I don’t know the details, and honestly I don’t really care for the drama, but if you’re not happy with the current options for servers and governance, just host your own?
You seem to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to operate like, and you said in another response, that you have experience building servers.
It’s not hard to get a server built that has enough compute and storage to support the kind of capacity you’re talking about. Any used, corporate desktop from the last 7-10 years has more than enough compute to handle hundreds of active users. Storage is the main issue, but that’s not unattainable either. As of a week ago, Server Monkey was selling certified refurbished Dell enterprise 6TB HDDs for $175 each. $700 gets you around 18TB with one disk for redundancy using ZFS. 18TB will hold quite a bit of dank memes, especially if you limit the max resolution to something reasonable.
1,500 new pictures per day, all 50 megapixel JPEGs is roughly 670GB per month, so even at that pretty crazy rate (by Lemmy standards) your 18TB server would last two years before getting totally full.
Backblaze archival storage is $1,500 per year for 18TB if you want long term secure cloud backups for your entire server, that’s just $125 a month that you’d need to fund yourself or get donations for. Not nothing, but hardly unattainable for a small instance. I used to play on a tiny Minecraft server that had maybe 20 active players, and they made more than $125 per month on donations.
I mean, again, all of this code is FOSS. If you really feel that your approach would be significantly more successful, dive in and build out your own instance. Get some friends involved, split up the costs, market yourselves, get some nice branding, build alliances and partnerships with other instances, etc. There is literally nothing stopping you.