Maybe self-hosting needs to be made easier for the average person? The web has so much bandwidth now that there's no reason outside of potential security issues that people can't be posting more of their own stuff(like a web).
For instance, I want to be able to host my own files without having to make some sort of deal with my ISP. Although I've never had a problem serving requests directly from my computer, it's usually against the rules of ISPs. With a regular internet connection, I should be able to more easily store files on my own hardware and be able to share them with people as easily as I could with Instagram. Maybe there could even be an always-on hardware device that integrates in an open way with third parties that can serve those files, but ultimately those files live on that hardware and can be designated their own domains for URL resolution. Peer-to-peer and Cloudflare support could come with it out-of-the-box to mitigate load issues.
Meh, maybe nobody wants anything like that. I still like the idea.
With 99% of the images I want to share on the web - I don't really care if they aren't going to be around in five months time.
Also, what if the vendor of the box (That handles the integrations with third-party hosts) goes out of business? Am I going to now have to figure out how to hack my hardware to be allowed to talk to <Whatever the new image hosting service> is?
This is an inescapable rabbit hole of third-party dependencies.
The solution i have found so far is GitHub Pages. It seems the website, though static, can be arbitrarily deep and large.
It really is a one-liner to spin up a new service on your server nowadays.
Technology that aims to serve that audience should be reasonably usable for that audience.