Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing?
They are cheaper. Locations outside US/EU and very few countries in Asia are sometimes called “exotic” and can be a bit expensive. Lemmy also has this issue where servers that are distant from each other lag behind.
0.19.4 provides a way to see uploaded images (although not the best) but this version was only recently released so I can see where the frustration is coming from especially since the CSAM attacks happened nearly a year ago. At the time, I had to make a copy of pictrs, view everything on a file manager, and manually remove those images. People can still upload images without anyone seeing it however.
This was fixed in 0.19.3 (released 7 months ago) where you can disable image “caching”. This has solved storage costs for us together with pictrs’ image processing.
It’s unfortunate that we need this. Not everybody has the resources to run fedisafety nor does everyone live in USA where they can use Cloudflare’s CSAM scanner. I think a good way to deal with the issue is to have images that are not public, not be stored (or have no private images at all). This way images can be easily reported.
Overall, I understand the frustration and to some degree I also feel the same but I also limit my expectations considering the nature of the project.