Personally I think that contributing to an open source community is the move. Join the Eleuther Discord. Futz around on Hugging Face. Play with notebooks on Uberduck. Have fun!!! Gatekeeping is dumb.
Also, if they ever make another dataset like the pile, don't expect to get your own data into it (even if they say that they will add it).
I'd work with other groups if I were you.