"but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch." Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind)

"but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch." Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind), whereas images, videos, require several orders of magnitude larger data, and several orders of magnitude more processing power. CDNs are one bit of the puzzle, large specialized providers which will cache and store images around the globe for you, but those require obviously dedicated servers, associated hosting fees... The other portion, then obviously, is bandwidth. Even if you can get away without a CDN, you still need good up/down speeds, as do your users. The solution is/was partially to use bittorrent or other file-share protocols to offload your bandwidth. OFC, then come issues like defending your work from theft, etc, all of which are issues with the simple centralized system as well, not actually at odds with file sharing (you can implement DRM over bittorrent if you wanted to). No, here you can squarely point at RIAA, MPAA, US Congress (Interpol in the EU), and blame them for the current state affairs, bad policies having caused media monopolies. Until you strike down some of their more nonsensical decisions and bring the world back to file-sharing, alternatives to popular, performant, and widely available image/video sharing applications are not going to exist.