[zharknado]

Social networks are social advertising networks.

A privacy-first solution by its nature is unlikely to benefit from network effects. You don’t organically discover content that has to be explicitly shared with you.

So they way to do it is to already have a network or platform and then allow private photo sharing. E.g. Apple Photos built on the iOS ecosystem or if WhatsApp had a photo feed.

One idea would be to sell photo-sharing tech to a non-US messaging app that’s popular abroad like Viber or CacaoTalk or that serves some niche community. (Photo-sharing for low-bandwidth users in developing countries?) Maybe it aggregates shared photos into an ergonomic feed or something. But they could just copy that themselves; it’s hard to monetize an improved UX directly without the data/community to power it.