It seems like the images are playing a big role so perhaps having images being offloaded to another service (like catbox.moe) or converting images to WebP with a healthy amount of compression would help.

Basically decrease the amount of storage you folks are having to pay for.

Or auto delete pictures after a week or 2 and add a disclaimer about it to when pictures are being uploaded.

Maybe also a file size limit. Nothing over 10MB or whatever.

I hope this whole thing can be sorted out I dig this instance.