I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server

ok? then host your own. that's the fucking beauty of decentralized social media.

Coming from Wired, I’d hope the article would have a more technology focused approach,

Wired is for people who want to talk about technology without actually taking about technology.

Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.

I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.

It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.

Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.

I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server just as much as I’d trust Meta with my personal photos: I won’t.

I'm pretty sure Pixelfed wasn't intended to be a place to share your personal photos - it's meant for sharing photos you want to share with the public - could be a circle of friends or the whole world. Photos like pictures of your cats, food, landscapes etc. It's a place to share photos with friends, or a place to connect photographers with other photographers.