I'm sure they considered hosting matrix or zulip, I wonder what the estimated monthly cost of that would be for a community of their size
This leaves us with expensive offerings despite a pretty static load (a-la; cloud).
Back in the day, burgeoning sysadmins would have cut their teeth on projects like this, but sadly they'd need someone quite senior at this point to avoid major pitfalls.
I'm not even sure myself how I would prevent the abuse of uploaded images; both in terms of rate limiting new accounts and the potential harmful material that might be shared. -- And I am one of the sysadmin types who cut their teeth on problems like these.
If anyone reading this wants to talk, hit me up at matthew at element.io (or @matthew:matrix.org on Matrix)